It's September. Let's hit the books again. Bill Drew and Tom Corrigan will tag team on a "how to" session on Automating Excel from Visual FoxPro.

From Bill Drew's white paper, "If a VFP report is a data snap shot, then reporting from a worksheet is like the video. Better yet, it's like a movie set and your user is the director."

We will discuss the fundamental difference between the worksheet and the data table. The former is based on a positional metaphor, the later is geared toward storage and retrieval. How can the strengths of each be leveraged to make distributable, changeable, camera-ready output?

Answer: Excel exposes its methods to contol by a VFP program which also happens to "excel" at controlling its own data.

The price: Programming Excel Automation is more work than setting up a VFP report.

Learn to use VFP classes to handle repetitive formatting and control structures. Get insights into some of the trickier problems like page breaks, headers and footers, data grouping, and using ranges to specify your current output address.

Other topics welcome. Mike Hogan has reserved a time slice for a display of his web site: FoxPro Success Stories among other tid bits.

Same Time and Place. 2nd Tuesday of the month. Suite 826 53 W. Jackson Blvd. Chicago Loop 5:30 September 12.

http://www.ChicagoFUDG.com