Bing wrote:
Do you know what version of Excel is required for this
particular methodogly, and what sort of libraries neet to be
installed? (ie.
it look like Microsoft Jet has to be installed as the "database"
driver")

Jet 4.0 SP8 can be downloaded:

http://support.microsoft.com/default...b;en-us;829558

AFAIK this includes all the files needed to use Jet e.g. the OLE DB
providers for Jet.

ADO ships with MDAC and MDAC 2.8 is also a Microsoft download
(redistributable available):

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/d...DisplayLang=en

However, it is likely MDAC and Jet is available to you. MDAC ships with
Windows (but don't ask me which version with which version). To the
best of my knowledge, Jet 4.0 ships with Office/Excel version 2000 and
above, Jet 3.51 with Excel95 and Excel95. Jet (including the OLE DB
providers) formerly shipped with MDAC but was removed effective from
MDAC 2.6.

do you have any ideas how fast a query using ADO on a very large file

to do things like subtotaling compared to writing vba code to parse
same data
to do the subtotaling?

This sort of thing is what SQL was invented to do! My experience is
that using ADO and SQL to do such work can be orders of magnitude
faster than doing the same using procedural code. However, your data
must be suitable e.g. text files often do not have a consistent format,
data typing can be problematic, etc. Also, some text manipulations
(e.g. extracting a substring) can be hard to define using SQL alone, so
you may need some post-query processing.

Jamie.

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