This is in response to both of your most recent replies...

1. About storing things in document variables or in the registry: Your
concern is correct, the document variables of one document aren't available
to another document; but the registry still isn't a good choice. There's a
third alternative, a separate file on the disk, which you can read and write
with the System.PrivateProfileString property. The VBA help has a good
example of how to use it. That file will be available to any open document
on the same PC.

2. About the error: This requires some background. In Word there are plain
bookmarks, which you manage in the Insert > Bookmark dialog; and there are
bookmarks associated with form fields, which you see in the fields'
Properties dialog. If you simply cycle through the ActiveDocument.Bookmarks
collection, you'll get both kinds, but you can't treat them the same. The
error you see comes from trying to treat a form-field bookmark like a plain
bookmark, just assigning text to its range. But since the value you picked
up from the registry is the whole field including the field markers, VBA
complains. (The 'FORMTEXT' is part of the field code, which you can see when
you select the field in an unprotected document and press Shift+F9.)

The right way to go about this is to declare a FormField object, and then
cycle through the ActiveDocument.FormFields collection (Dim oFld As
FormField; For Each oFld In ActiveDocument.FormFields ...). One advantage of
this is that the code in this loop will never see any of the plain
bookmarks. A second advantage is that a FormField object has a property
named Type, and you can use an If statement or a Select Case statement to do
different things depending on whether its value is wdFieldFormTextInput (a
text box), wdFieldFormCheckBox, or wdFieldFormDropDown.

The value you should be storing, wherever you put it, should not be the
.Range.Text of some bookmark, but instead the .Value property of the
FormField object. For a textbox this will be the text in the box; for a
checkbox it will be either True or False; and for a dropdown it will be the
index (not the text!) of the selected item. When you retrieve the value from
storage, assign it back to the .Value property of the corresponding
FormField object.

I can sympathize with your frustration! The core of VBA is similar to VB,
but probably 80% of the things you need to know in VBA are the details of
the Word/Office object model and not just the programming principles. It
takes a while to get the hang of these things.