>I just started reading through this thread and am interested in the solution that you came up with. I tried to use xml and stylesheets but never could get it to work very well. What I ended up doing is creating a tab delimited string and using a .xls extension or if web change the content type to excel. It works well enough for simple data output however everything is a a general field so there is not the opportunity for formatting.So far this hasn't been a problem for me as it functions like the fox function.

I will reply later on tonight with the result. This will be a new thread with the required components to achieve that native Excel spreadsheet from a dataset.