Michel,

I'm not sure exactly what you're saying, but I assume what you mean by "XML preserve syntax", is that the tag for the column is being generated even when there's no data in it? The problem isn't the DataSet.WriteXml() ... those columns are not empty, they contain spaces. I think varchar columns don't cause this to happen, only char columns (not 100% sure about that).

~~Bonnie



>In a dataset, when we use that and convert it into an XML, I have found that if a string field is empty, this will create a XML preserve syntax. This is very annoying as when we open that document in Excel, we have this breakup in the spreadsheet because of this XML syntax which is being inserted. The only way I have found is to Trim() each string field in the dataset because doing to loDataSet.WriteXml() command. Anyone has found a way to have this as a setting instead of having to trim() as the strin fields?