I've found many uses of Excel and Word, primarily when coupled with the VBA automation tool or an external program that gains access to the data. Word is very nice to format and parse ASCII files. Excel has found its way into two fairly extensive applications (months to develop). The first is as a data entry/maintenance system for EDA tool schematic and land-pattern symbol development. This is significantly easier to manage than doing it the CAD way, particularly if you are dealing with large BGA's with hundreds of pins. For example, I can define a 500 pin BGA's land pattern and choose to slice and dice it in different ways for different schematic symbols according to the project needs. The other interesting use for Excel is as the data entry/database system for an automated code generator that produces very large and complex table-driven state machines for embedded systems (well, 8051 assembler at the moment, C as soon as the need arises). An obvious application is the generation and maintenance of a menu system for an embedded device. You can move menu branches around, add and delete branches, even edit names, etc. and, after a few clicks, have new code to cut and paste into the source file. A HUGE time saver, not to mention the very valuable avoidance of human data-entry error due to the tedium and repetition involved. I have found applications that require more than the 2^16 rows Excel offers. In this case, I've used MS Access to import and manipulate comma delimited files with hundreds of thousands of rows. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Martin Euredjian eCinema Systems, Inc. voice: 661-305-9320 fax: 661-775-4876 martin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx ecinema@xxxxxxxx www.ecinemasys.com ------------------------------------------------------------------ To unsubscribe from si-list: si-list-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx with 'unsubscribe' in the Subject field or to administer your membership from a web page, go to: //www.freelists.org/webpage/si-list For help: si-list-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx with 'help' in the Subject field List FAQ wiki page is located at: http://si-list.org/wiki/wiki.pl?Si-List_FAQ List technical documents are available at: http://www.si-list.org List archives are viewable at: //www.freelists.org/archives/si-list or at our remote archives: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/si-list/messages Old (prior to June 6, 2001) list archives are viewable at: http://www.qsl.net/wb6tpu