Re: [DUG]: Interfacing to Excel

[Nello Sestini]

Wheras calling Excel in the same way eg:-             WinExec('C:\MicrosoftOffice\Office\Excel.exe Sample.csv', sw_normal); will not start Excel and automatically load the 'Sample.csv' file, and neither can I make it start in a similar fashion from the Windows Application "RUN" menu.     What is so different about Excel?  I can call it from Explorer. I can even double-click on a .CSV file in explorer and start Excel by association thus loading and displaying the file I clicked on.   it's not clear from your description whether the problem is that Excel doesn't start, or that it starts but fails to open sample.csv   but here are some ramblings - i hope more useful than no response:   i tried your code above (D5 NT4.0) and it ran excel and opened the csv file.   I needed to fix up the path - my excel wasn't on drive C:   But also (perhaps more importantly) I needed to change "MicrosoftOffice" to "Microsoft Office".   It may be you need to make this change as well.   Try testing the return value from Winexec.   Strangely the return is  > 31 on success, some small integer on normal failures, and 0 on "out of memory".   "Out of memory" is Microsoft's name for lots of errors that have nothing to do with memory or being out of it.   For example, I tried     ret:=WinExec('\\foo\Excel.exe Sample.csv', sw_normal);   and got back 0 for ret (the real problem being i don't have a machine on the network named 'foo')   If I don't change MicrosoftOffice to Microsoft Office I get back a ERROR_FILE_NOT_FOUND (=2).  The documentation also claims a return of ERROR_PATH_NOT_FOUND is possible but i was not ever able to induce mine to not find a path - it always insists it is the file it can not find.   Also - the csv file needed to be in my "Personal" folder - by default that is where Excel Open goes looking for unqualified filenames.   Finally, if you're doing this on w2k instead of NT maybe this is a permission issue.    2k is fussier about permissions generally (although I can't think of what the problem would be).   -ns