Hi Christer

If you're talking about VSTO (this is a VSTO forum, after all) then it would certainly be fastest to use the ServerDocument technology with bookmark controls and data binding.

If you're not talking about VSTO, then you're in the wrong group... But fastest would be to use the XML approach then transform the Word document (saved in XML file format) before passing it to the user.

Note that in both cases the document is being processed before opening it in Word. You take the biggest speed hit when you have to automate the COM object model.