Hi Chris I would investigate Tony's product first - that may well save you a bunch of work. I'm generating OpenXML from a number of different places - so if your requirement is for UniVerse only I'd look to Nebula and see if it covers your needs.
If you do find afterwards that you still want to look at OpenXML, it's reasonably simple to update and manage but you need to invest some time understanding the structure. Essentially, it's based on something called Open Packaging Convention which is a zipped archive under the hood - though not compatible will all ZIP programs :(. Within that archive, the content is divided into a number of separate 'parts' all of which link together to create a document - so a Word document will have separate parts for the main body, section headers and footers, media elements, embedded pictures etc. Once you have walked through that maze, the spreadsheet markup is simple as far as the data content is concerned: there are some gotchas when reading data (shared strings, for example) but you can generally avoid them all if you are the one generating it. All the content is separated from the styling, and held in a simple sheetData element for the chosen worksheet. Each worksheet is a separate XML doc within the archive. The difficulty is in adding new styles for formatting, simply because the format there is very verbose. Your best bet is to create a template, apply various styles within that template to dummy cells and save it. Then you have all the styling information ready to use and you can simply apply them to your cells by adding a style number attribute. It's worth noting that OpenXML was introduced as the standard format for Office 2007, but there is a free download from Microsoft called the Office Compatibility Pack that lets earlier versions of Office read and write in that format. I'd recommend the free eBook 'OpenXML Explained' by Wouter van Vugt. IIRC it's downloadable via www.openxmldeveloper.org. Brian _______________________________________________ U2-Users mailing list U2-Users@listserver.u2ug.org http://listserver.u2ug.org/mailman/listinfo/u2-users
