>Okay, I'll take it a step further. These same Fortune 500 customers send us spreadsheets (on occasion) and they ask us to fill them in and submit them back to them. Your turn... *grin*

For a million bucks I buy Excel. But after I buy it, it doesn't mean I'm gonna be inconsiderate enough to send all my outgoing docs as proprietary formats, though.

>I'm merely pointing out that business requirements are more important than document standards. We have got to do whatever it takes to make our customers happy. :)

All of the Doc files that I get in the email that can't be opened in WordPad get lost.

I understand though what you mean though. If its important (very rarely) I'll have a friend give me table structures from an Access Database or somethign like that (Koziol's MDB2DBC requires access to be installed cause of automation), then I can use other ways to get to the data, once I know what I'm looking for.