Help.. I started a little project to make a tote board in our office.
It's grown... My original idea was to use PowerPoint with linked
Excel spreadsheets and just update the spreadsheets as needed. Great!
looked good, worked good.... Then project creep set in. "Pat, can we
link the sheets to live data in our database?" I thought, heck, I can
pull live data no problem from Excel.. "Sure I can do it!" And I can..
I just can;t get it to work with PowerPoint.

Where I stand now is that I have my SQL database exporting tables to
spreadsheets. Sounds good, except that Excel doesn't like my XLS files
it opens them fine in Excel, but they are nothing but tab delimited
text files with xls extensions..You can't reference these from other
spreadsheets unless you have them open at the same time.

Is there a way to either create a "Real" XLS file from SQL, or to
convert my *******ized xls files into real XLS files programatically.
I'm updating my exports ever 10 minutes.. The department heads wanted
realtime data. I can make it all work on a single machine, but I want
to be able to let anyone open up the ppt file and see what's
happening, and that requires the autorefresh of the xls lookups.

Thanks in advance!

Patrick (DBA)