I first started with COM to Excel as an offline server, but too slow and needed Excel installed. Then I created a small Macro to push the data in Excel to a DB, but too many things could go wrong. Finally I ended up with using ODBC to talk to Excel. Now I can use all the same ODBC commands I know and love to get data out of the Excel "database". Watch out for table names. They aren't standard. Get to grips with the odbc_tables command and other meta data within the xls file. Worksheets, named ranges, page layouts are all tables. I'm pretty sure there are more "table" types, but I can't remember off the top of my head. Oh. I've never bothered writing using the Excel ODBC driver. So, this my be read-only.
