The 3rd party product is an OLAP-DBMS. We link it to Excel via an add-in that
was provided by the 3rd party which contains a number of worksheet formula
specifying data-slices. I also tend to use it as a COM object in VBA because
I find the formula interface a bit cumbersome.

The addin starts a background task that controls all the data access
calculations. So presumably it's using the DBMS as COM object too. Excel is
only used to display and input data, few data calulations just UI. The task
is more or less an executable file, an application that can be started
without excel.

A lot of the addins functions are based on worksheet ranges for input and
output of the OLAP slices. For some reason these formula don't like to work
when multiple instances of Excel are open together. It's almost as if there's
a programming error where someone hasn't properly referenced the a range
properly.

I don't have access to get in an look at what's going-on in the addin.
They're very protective of their little chunk of code. I'm not sure why, the
whole product is a little bit unstable and has a number of, well I'll call
them quirks to be polite. I seem to find myself constantly looking for work
arounds like this one.



- Rm