>>I've been using COPY to blah.xls TYPE XLS for years, but just found out that using TYPE XL5 formats dates properly. The problem with XL5 is that my column widths are all lost and each is the exact same default width. Any ideas how to solve this?
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>I would use Automation to change the column widths, after creating the Excel file.
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>Doing everything with Automation (copying one cell at a time) would be much slower, so using COPY TO ... XL5 does make sense.

Not necessarily. I'm doing _vfp.datatoclip(,,3) and then pasting it via automation. Extremely fast. Also, I'd have a template sheet, pre-formatted, and then saveas() after pasting. The longest part of this is instantiation of Excel.