Microsoft Office merge documents from WSH/batch?

I am trying to compare and merge a bunch of Office documents using a batch file or Windows Scripting Host file. Basically, I have a couple folders with copies on another computer, and they used to be merged using Windows Briefcase, but it's buggy. Most are doc or rtf, but I would also like to do txt, ppt, xls, htm, etc. if possible. I don't want to download other tools. I have Office 7, 97, and 2002. I couldn't find any command line switches to do this. Does anyone know of any? Alternatively, is there a way to use DDE or something from a script to do this? The only way I've found is to use VBA. I'm also looking into how to control VBA from vbScript, in case that's what I'll end up doing.