Michel,

It just dawned on me what you were saying about this ... you purposely have put the "preserve" syntax in your XML, correct? Well, of course you'll get the column in Excel, because that's the purpose of that syntax ... to preserve white space (the syntax is actually xml:space="preserve"). If you didn't purposely put that syntax in there, you must have done something other than a simple DataSet.WriteXml() because that will not use that syntax.

~~Bonnie




>>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).
>
>I don't have that code anymore as I adjusted to trim. But, it was something like:
>
>

><CarColor XML=preserve></CarColor>
>

>
>What that was added in the XML tag, Excel was showing another column next to that one. If was a column added at the conversion time before.