Sorry, looks like I didn't ask the question very well. blob = binary
large object.

Imagine you open a spreadsheet, just running Excel interactively. The
file you load up sits on the disk, right? And you just issue a "File |
Open" command, select the filename, and you're away...

And of course there's nothing to stop you doing exactly the same thing
programmatically with vba.

Well, in my case I have a program that wants to load up a spreadsheet.
Only thing is, the spreadsheet isn't a file on the disk, it is sitting
in a chunk of the program's memory. Now, as far as my program is
concerned it is just a bunch of binary data, won't make any sense to it
(just the same as if you open an xls file in notepad).

So, the thing to do is to load this chunk of memory into Excel - then I
can use the excel object model to peek at the row/column values.

Hence my earlier question. I want to be able to load a spreadsheet from
memory rather than from a physical file. Any takers?