>ultimately, i want to send the data to either word or excel to take advantage of the formatting, graphing and other presentation capabilities. i was thinking that i would try to get vfp to pre-process the data for me and avoid placing burden of sorting, grouping and totaling on these other products.
>
>if you have any other idea, please let me know.
>
>thanks,
>pbd
Paul,
Take a look at www.informit.com. You can view Menachem Bazian's VFP6 book. Chapter 21 covers what you are trying to do. FoxPro Advisor had two articles in the issue that was distributed at DevCon. I think it was the July 1999 issue.

Perry is right. Fox can handle the data for you. The only thing Excel may do better is calculations.

Tom Molloy

PS.A tip to get better performance from Excel is to turn the auto calculation
     off. Every cell gets calculated on every entry. You have to remember
     to calculate if you are using formulas. For formating both Word and Excel work great.