Yes, this is correct the MSXML2.DOMDocument parser is the culprit for speed. I suspect that the C/C++ solution is doing a direct read of the XML file. There is another solution for reading the XLSX file into VFP but does not have the formatting capability of my class -- but it is built for speed; see http://praisachion.blogspot.com/2016/01/importfromxlsx-13.html