Not quite what I was looking for thanks Tom. See my reply to Tamar.

>If possible, try to use something like Excel PivotTables. Very flexible and fast with drilldown capabilities. May not work in your situation but you will completely eliminate the need for the very slow cell by cell population. See this article by Hector Correa for more info:
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>http://www.utmag.com/June2002/Page13.asp
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>>Does anyone have any tips for speeding up the creation of excel files using
>>createobj('excel.application')
>>and then populating cells with
>>oApp.workbooks(1).sheets(1).cell(x, y) = {somevalue}
>>Doing it this way gives me the control I need over multiple sheets but is MUCH slower than COPY TO {ddd} TYPE XLS.
>>For example, are their some properties of the excel object I can set to speed things up?