Hi Peter,

FYI

We talk about Excel 2003

It's formated excel with hidden information on all cells like comments, alignemts, lockings and whatever. Need to do this cell by cell. The customer create a xlt and we fill up. (can not add my feelings here)

But we found a workaround just within the minute.

We do

 oExecl = CREATEOBJECT('Excel.application')
 oExeclTemp = CREATEOBJECT('Excel.application')

fill_sheet(oExcel)

 oExeclTemp.quit()
 oExecl.quit()

release; 
 oExeclTemp,;
 oExecl

it seems that it will crasp the second instance for any outside call.

It's a kludge, but it will work.

Agnes
>>Hi all,
>>
>>we have trouble with our excel automation.
>>
>>Our customer urged us (against our recommendation) to put some data in an excel sheet. We designed it for some (smaller then 100) lines. No they use it for several thousend lines and the thing goes slow. While waiting the customer is runing an other spreadsheet by selecting an xls from the explorer. This opens up the instance we use with vfp and vfp receives an ole error 0x800ac472 that basicaly means somehow excel is not responding. We can retry and the life goes one (after a while). But now they see our spreadsheet! They start playing with it and after a while they quit excel. And now it goes worst. VFP is receiving an error and we lost our sheet!
>>
>>This all does not happen if Excel is started as excel exe (via startmenu)
>>
>>So how can I avoid that my instance gets visible?
>>
>>Agnes
>What is it you do with Excel? A lot of formatting or \just a lot of data
>if it's just data there are a couple of ways
> 1 create a dbf and then open it in Excel
> 2 create an array, open a pre-formatted template xls and set a range to the array
> 3 or if all else fails, the brute force way: create your excel object and rename excel.exe to _excel.exe until you are done then rename it back
>
>Peter