Doug, ( or whom ever)  Thank you for yur comments. I've been mulling over
what you said and perhaps the UserForm might be more to the point, but at
this point, I'm stuck with trying to do it work Word. And I'm really puzzled
if the addition of lines with form fields would solve the problem either.  
 I've tried to create as much of the Estimate.DOT as possible and will
attempt to attach it here if i can figure out how.  In the first table using
calculations I used 'bm1' and 'bm2' as column totals using a =sum(above) to
create a result in those BookMark fields. Similarly in the second table
'bm3', 'bm4', and 'bm5' are used with a similar calculation for Bookmark
field results.  The final table, then, references those book marks to do
subtotals, some auxiliary calculations, salestax and a final overall total.  
Well, that was the plan anyway, but obviously the syntax is wrong and "the
index too large"  with no indication in Microsoft info sources as to what
that means.

Oh well, the idea of attaching the file was a good one, but i do not see how
i could do it!  The following four error messages are from the table doing
the final calculations showing the error message and the formula causing them.

1 Sub-Total st1      !Index Too Large

{ =SUM(bm1,bm3,bm5) \# $#,##0.00 ) }

Miscellaneous st2      !Syntax Error, ;

{ =SUM(bm2;bm4) \# $#,##0.00 )}    also tried { =SUM(bm2,bm4) }  and got the
index too large message

Sales Tax 0.07525% st3    !Syntax Error, [

{ =SUM(0.07525*st1,0.07525*st2) \# $#,##0.00 }

Total  st4                       !Index Too Large

{ =SUM(st1,st2,st3) \# $#,##0.00 }

Updating values will still present a problem as well as additional lines as
2 items in each  of the service type tables will probably be insufficient,
but if i can get the calcuations working i'll be thrilled!  Thanks.