Jim Charter wrote:
> Frustrating to me because while scripting such an 
> app is well within my capability, writing something that could be 
> compiled, secured, licensed, and distributed, is not.

If that's what you're trying to do, I'd suggest writing a program that 
invokes Excel via COM automation. That is, write a program in a higher-level 
language (Perl, Python, Tcl, C#, anything.NET, etc) that downloads the excel 
spreadsheet to the local drive, starts Excel running without it opening a 
window, and tells Excel to extract the list you're interested in and save it 
as a CSV file, then script all you like from there.  Alternately, continue 
using COM to drive Excel and simply ask it what the value in each cell of 
the spreadsheet is, comparing against your list.

I.e., treat reading the excel file in much the same way you'd read XML and 
process it with javascript DOM stuff. *That* would be the part you could 
compile and distribute. (This is the sort of thing .NET would be very good 
for - Excel spreadsheets turn into just another object you access in C# with 
array-index syntax and things like that.)

It would be pretty easy to tell the people using it that they need a 
sufficiently-recent version of excel installed, and to install the ".NET 
automation libraries" from the add/remove program details for Excel, and 
then run your program.

-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   I ordered stamps from Zazzle that read "Place Stamp Here".

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