Hi Jon -

I understand. I also work with charts and tables present in documents
in order to write my commentary, and if he's just got a few to churn
out, then your approach makes eminent sense.

I'm now looking into how to generate what I need in XML in order to
feed such a system. Guess that it means I'll be learning XML and
JavaScript on top of my other work, but I'm also looking at Ruby as an
alternative, since it seems to hash very, very nicely with XML.

But it really means a different way of looking at these sorts of
problems. We will probably outgrow Office as it currently exists, but
will end up in Office.Net for many, many of our rather complex and
arcane tasks.

The future is gonna be exciting, albeit harder and harder: but if we
can continue the kind of productivity increases that we have had over
the last ten years, then I can continue getting the kind of raises I
have been. And that's what drives this boy to do such crazy and wild
things. :-)

And I will keep y'all posted when we get to the point where we start
playing with this more seriously...

John