>>I don't know why but...
>>COPY TO (jcfile) TYPE XLS
>>runs much faster across a WAN than
>>COPY TO (jcfile) TYPE XL5
>
>In my tests the first COPY to command was at least 15 times faster than the second one. I'm wondering what kind of additional processing COPY TO ... XL5 does that makes it much slower.

One thing about the XLS format, though, is that it doesn't treat date fields properly. I see dates formatted as "30-Mar-00" in XLS as opposed to "03/30/2000" in XL5, and changing the format doesn't automatically fix it.

Doug