After hours of searching and finding nothing, I found a solution that works well. Just take advantage of Excel. I thought that enabling Excel within Word would slow things down significantly, but I was wrong. I simply added these lines to other folks' suggested Excel VBA translation code into my Word VBA code after the url has been established. (This will replace the 'standalone' WorksheetFunction reference):

 Dim xlApp As Object, xlAppWsf As Object
    Set xlApp = CreateObject("Excel.Application")
    Set xlAppWsf = xlApp.WorksheetFunction
    resp = xlAppWsf.WebService(url)

Of course, the first three lines above can be placed in the declaration section of your sub or function. You should set the newly created objects to 'Nothing' at the end of the process.