Excel Viewer

[Guest]

I working on an app I want to distribute. Prospective users may or may not
have Excel installed. I would like to create reports in .xls format using
automation.
The question is, if I use automation to create spreadsheets and the end user
does not have Excel on their computer, in fact, consider no Office apps at
all, will Excel Viewer provide the DLL's necessary for my automation code to
run?

 

[John Nurick]

Hi Klatuu,

I assume you don't mean exporting reports to Excel with
DoCmd.OutputTo<g>.

A quick search of the microsoft.public.excel.* newsgroups suggests that
the Excel Viewer can't be Automated. Certainly there's a recent post
from Chip Pearson to that effect. However there was a thread last year
in m.p.e.programming titled "Programmatically Controlling Excel Viewer"
which suggests that you can step into the past and control the Excel
Viewer with DDE.

 

[Guest]

No, I would almost never use an OutputTo. Were I export a spreadsheet, I
would use the TranferSpreadsheet. What I was hoping was to be able to use
the Excel object model via VBA and create the reports I want. I do this
pretty regulary where I am now because they prefer all their reports in Excel
rather than a printed version.

The app I am working on involves a scoring system. The most difficult part
is that the number of columns can vary from 5 to n. The normal maximum would
be about 40. Sure, I can do that with an Access report, but the other reason
is that a lot of the organizations using it would like to be able to use an
Excel version to post to their web sites. Some will have Excel and others
will not.

Not having used DDE before, I would have to do some serious studying to see
if I can do what I need to do. Does DDE have equivilant capabilites to
Automation?

 

[John Nurick]

No way. DDE only exposes a limited subset of an Office application's
capabilities, and it tends to run much more slowly.

As for the studying: the documentation seems hard to find these days,
but if you ask in microsoft.public.excel.interopoledde with luck you'll
find a shellback who still knows where it is.

 

[Guest]

Thanks for the input, John. I don't think I am going to worry about DDE or
anything else. I believe I will create the output in Report format for those
who don't have Excel and allow it as a option for those who do. I'll just
test for the Excel reference at runtime.