Alex,

if you have a look into the Word VBA help, you'll find that the Word
object model supplies an access to the Taskpane collection. You may
show the Formatting Task Pane with the following line in the direct
window:

Application.TaskPanes(wdTaskPaneFormatting).Visible = True

You can use the other Task Panes referring to them through the
constants like wdTaskPaneDocumentProtection, wdTaskPaneResearch etc.
However, Word seems to be the only application which allows the direct
access to the different forms of the task pane object. Excel permits
only to declare the entire task pane as an object variable of the type
"Commandbar", and the Powerpoint object knows only a RefreshPane method
for a SmartDocument interface.

It helps if you start the application (e.g. Word, Excel, Powerpoint)
and go to the VBA object browser or the VBA help to search for
keywords, if you plan to program against these applications.

Hope this helps
Peter