>>>That sounds painful. :P
>>>
>>>So the end result is a printout? Not a file? Is it printed locally, or to a network printer?
>>
>>Network printer. Very few people have a local printer here, but there are some.
>>
>>The result is a "Creel Diagram" that displays how the creel is to be loaded with various yarn components to produce the necessary beams to use in tufting the carpet. It's a fairly complex problem.
>>
>
>Is a creel a piece of machinery? Or is it a fish? <g>

< s >It's a rack where cones of yarn are placed on posts. The yarn is then fed to what's call a beam that winds it all up. Looks like a big spool of thread when it's done. Depending on the machine, there are over a thousand individual "threads" of yarn on 12 to 16 beams. For example, a typical 12 foot wide carpet with the needles spaced 1/10th of an inch apart has 1,440 of these threads. This yarn is pre-dyed and there can be a number of different components. The one I'm working on as a test begins:

6B AA 6B CC 6B DD 6B EE 6B FF

In the above there are six different yarns. The number six in the above indicates six occurrences of the alpha character that follows. The above pattern repeats across the full width of the carpet.

>Not that you need any more layers, but there is absolutely no way the local COM server could dump the information to a central server, which in turn created the spreadsheet (via Excel) and printed it to the appropriate place?
>
>It's probably only a theoretical question, since you should be able to get this solved in 1-2-3.

The application is being deployed right now at 5 different plants. The project has been going on two years, so it's a bit late in the game for this sort of change.