Was curious if there was a way to set a weapon so that it will launch enemies into the air the way that giants do? I wanted to do this mainly to just mess around and have some fun every now and then.

Sorry to bump this myself, but I have tried searching around the internet with no luck. Is the launching effect a bug? based upon how hard the giants hit? or is it something else like a certain type of damage? I am just really curious what causes this and how I might replicate it on a weapon, if possible.

Just a suggestion - try looking at the draugr death lord shout. There's an occasional chance that it will launch you in the direction of the shout. There might be a similar property between this and being launched by giants.

In Oblivion, I used this in a weapon enchant to do what your asking.

http://www.creationkit.com/PushActorAway_-_ObjectReference

If I recall correctly, isn't the effect being killed by a giant has something to do with the way excess damage is handled (something about the excess damage being converted into momentum which is applied to the ragdoll)?

I wanted to try out the death lord shout above but was unable to find a way to add it in as an enchant to my weapons. However, the werewolf knockback effect could be enchanted onto a weapon, so I decided to go find it in the editor and see if I could make it more powerful. One thing I noticed while in the menus to edit the knockback effect, was that there was a window under the words "Papyrus Scripts" and listed there was "voicepusheffectscript". Clicking on this and then going into properties allowed me to change an "int" value, and the higher I made this, the further the person I hit with my weapon would fly. Seems I got lucky through trial and error. Still, thank you Lt_Sherpa, without your suggestion I probably would not have gone digging through the different enchanting effects trying to find a solution.