Claude,

The point in not using OWC in this case would be to not have a dependency on yet another ActiveX installed on the user machine and it's necessary security permissions set to allow it to run from the browser... raw VML doesn't have any of these downsides. And all in all it's probably easier to gen the VML than it is to talk to Excel to have it gen VML.

And yes it's a licensing reasons to not have to have Office installed on the webserver that will ultimately host this page.

>I believe you can also have the drill-down feature which would require an ActiveX download if using a browser. Malcolm was describing if you just wanted to display charts, they could be displayed dynamically with OWC(using something like ActiveVFP or WWC). Also, I believe it's not a technical requirement that Excel be on the server, but, might be a licensing thing...