>>Now I'm a puzzled. Will you know anything about the data a priori? If not, how will you decide what formatting to use in Excel?
>
>From VFP, without knowing anything about the data, we were simply doing a COPY TO TYPE XL5 command, from the cursor, to obtain the XLS. So, we would have assumed the same would have been supported in .NET. By now, we know this is not possible. This is a big missing in .NET. However, we are looking for alternatives and one of them seems to be to purchase a 3rd party tool, such as suggested so far, to export the dataset. Basically, from the dataset, it should be one command to export into the XLS, such as we do in VFP from the cursor.

Ahah! I thought you needed formatting and stuff. A simple dumping to an Excel file can be done in .NET. It's not as simple as VFP, but it is do-able. Use the JET ODBC provider to work with a spreadsheet like a database:

http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=316934