>Hi Srdjan,
>
>Sorry for not mentioning your other approach.. it was a very valuable suggestion as well! I agree that could be considered a 4th approach. That would be pretty flexible and would solve my problem of left justifying the output, and solve a lot of other problems, probably with less code. I have done something similar in reports in years past. The only problem I see with this is that the client wants a fair amount of flexibility with the output. I think I will need to put some columns in bold, vary the color, etc. I also **might** be using frx2any to get the output into excel (so far not flexible enough - might have to use OLE Automation) Am I right that I would be limited in my ability to change fonts, colors, etc. if I pursued the one long frx field approach?
Yes, that is right.
As far as excel is concearned, I think you should realy look at CodeRep & Rep2Excel free downloads that I mentioned before - sooner rather then later.
They can both cover excel part of your request like peace of cake
since they are made for this. You can easily chg fonts, insert pictures , format cells etc. (See samples there)
Problem is with ordinary preview/print where there is no way to programatically write/preview/print graphic output. Before VFP9 we had FRX and that was it. Wrapped PDFL library was my first real answer that I found for covering this need.
Mentioned reporting scripts released lately by few reporting add-on vendors (I tried myself xfrx demo (+++) ) are in my opinion - another quantum leap that happened in VFP reporting next to VFP9.
But they passed relatively unnoticed, and kind of on the back door, while everybody was mesmerised with VFP9 reporting engine rolling down the red carpet.
Maybe something simillar is / or will be possible with VFP9 listeners
where we could write directly to page matrix using GDI+ calls, and then having it all previewed / printed via ordinary VFP9 preview/print.
I did not hv time to explore all this just yet - but if possible that would be called - absolute perfection :))
