"John.Greenan" wrote in message
...

3. Hooking your DDE feeds into an Excel RTD solution - should remove
the
need to have 20 excel instances but may prove to be time consuming - a
VB/C++/c# based solution rather than VBA.

I'd have to write a calculation engine, wouldn't I? Excel already has
one;
that's why I'm using it ;-)

--No. Read the documentation for RTD. It replaces DDE in communication
with Excel.

Maybe I'm getting the wrong end of the stick here. I have a DDE feed from a
manufacturing process. This is not negotiable. If I write a, say vb.net app
to consume the DDE feed and do my analysis before feeding the results back
to Excel via RTD I /will/ have to reproduce Excel's (server workbook)
calculations in my vb.net code, won't I?

They're already hidden. That's the default when you create an automation
instance.

Why not post your "COM Loader" code?? It's hard to make novel suggestions
when there's no code to look at.


It's very simple, but there's too much to post. I have a class that wraps
the Excel.Application object (declared Withevents) and a strongly-typed
collection of instances of that class. When I want to create a new 'server'
instance I call the Add method of the collection and that goes off and
creates the new instance of Excel and loads up the DDE consumer workbook.
The class raises events when things of interest happen inside my 'server'
instance of Excel. These events are captured and converted to information,
alerts etc on the user interface.

Thanks

Robert