>>Hi Dragan,
>>
>>>If you allow for automation but hate the slowness... consider selecting all in excel, .selection.copy(), strtofile(_cliptext, "my.csv", but the actual format is tab delimited) and >see how you like the result. Then of course, instead of reading that file back, just nRows=alines(al, _cliptexT) and take it from there. This should be very fast.
>>
>>That looks like a nice trick:)
>>
>>I am using the "range" function to fetch Excel blocks of cells into VFP arrays. That is certainly faster as well than moving through Excel sheets on a cell per cell basis.
>
>Then just do .range.select() and proceed with .selection.copy()... see if that works for you.
>
>>I still find the effort of the developer to make and sell a broad alternative to MS-Excel tinkering via COM worth a look and will possibly - should money permit and the product be reasonably robust - re-implement my current set VFP-based Excel automation routines with this product in the coming months. Why? I dislike the "latency" of Excel-automation and, architecture-wise, the idea that a third-party interactive application software delivers a critical part of the functionality you offer...
>
>Automation had its charm in the day, but as years go by, it's exactly what you say - Office detests being a computing tool, it wants to be a clicking user's toy. For a while I was maintaining a converter from .doc into .pdf, using first the word to .ps printing, then GhostScript to convert .ps into .pdf - which worked fine with Word 2003. But then with Word 2007 it got much worse, as it developed new dialogs which couldn't be removed, ate 200K of memory for each file open (even though no editing was done, it was opened read-only) which it wouldn't return, maintained a list of bad documents which could be emptied only by endless clicking etc etc.
>
>With the 64-bit Windows, printing to .ps became impossible, as Adobe hasn't updated the driver since 1991 and I had to use the export-to-pdf plugin for Word2003 or the native export in 2007 or later, which worked fine but I still had to kill the instance of Word every 20 documents, just to release the memory and prevent a crash. Awful. Actually had to buy a 3rd party component which had the .doc-to-.pdf component, just to avoid any dealing with Office programmatically.

MS has had this KB article for some time: https://support.microsoft.com/kb/257757 . They just keep adding new products it applies to at the end :-/

The Office suite is not server-side rated/heavy duty/professional grade (or whatever you want to call that).