[snip]
>Larry,
>
>A pain? Yeah, I agree. But I'll tell you why I prefer some MS products even with this additional inconvenience. We're a Lotus shop (Shaw that is). I have some applications that have to use 1-2-3 as an automation server. It's pain simply because it's so poorly documented. There's no defintiion of their symbolic constants, not even in their type libraries. You have to guess. So I end up spending a lot more time working on stuff that uses 1-2-3 than I do with Excel (I write the stuff so that in the event that we change I don't have to change the software). Simply put, taking the additional few minutes to register something is far outweighs the frustration and aggravation of hunting through the Lotus docs, type libraries and web site.

You doing that on the Lotus client side or the server side? Lotus servers are available on Linux, ya know.. :)