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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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