You would have to query the DB (using ADO is one way) to retrieve the blob.
Reconstruct it on disk as a file. Then XL could open it.
VBA can accomplish that.

NickHK

"Paul C" bl...
Hi
Our CEO has come up with an 'idea'
He wants to save the formatting of a sheet and export it to a database.
Then, later - retrieve this formatting data and read in data from our 4GL
application so it is formatted in the desired manner (Excel already reads
in the data from 4GL via an addin).
This is so the users only have to push 'one button' to save their
formatting and 'one button' to get it back.

Now this sounded fantastically complicated as who knows what formatting
they will have applied to cells/ranges/sheets and the interrogation would
be excessive. So we thought we would just save a *.xls or *.xlt of the
sheet with formatting and then read the file back in and save it as a
binary object in the database (SQL Server or Oracle). However, I don't see
that there is a way for Excel to be able to read in an XLS/XLT file and
write it to a database. It just deals in TextStreams?

Is this proposal just not possible with Excel and its VBA?

Thanks

Paul