I'm new here. Let's see if I can make that look better:

When exporting a mapped range in Excel via an XSD schema to XML , this line
in the schema...
\<xs:element name=\"available\" type=\"xs:string\" default=\"AV\" \

usually results in a line like this in the XML file...
\<available\y\</available\

but if the cell is empty, it results in just....
\<available/\ (NOTE: default \"AV\" value ignored)

This empty element causes a Java script on the server to quit, so I am
looking at all angles to prevent that. From the Excel end: am I using the
DEFAULT option correctly? What do I need to do in Excel to tell it to
actually replace blank fields with \"AV\"? This is for a dataset that will
have
some empty values probably forever, so data validation isn't a convenient
option at all, and I'd rather not have the data entry people enter \" \" or
\"-\" into every blank cell.

Thanks for any suggestions. - Bill