Author: Jonas Bilinkevicius

There seems to be no way to map the variant OLEObject to an interface (in our case 
Word 2000) or even cast it so at design time.

Answer:

Yes there is. The OleContainer's OleObject property holds the document as an 
IDispatch, and you can just cast to the interface you want. For example:

1   { ... }
2   Doc: _Document;
3   { ... }
4   
5   OleContainer1.CreateObjectFromFile(Path, False);
6   OleContainer1.DoVerb(ovShow);
7   Doc := IDispatch(OleContainer1.OleObject) as _Document;