Screen Scraping &DDE,OLE

Hi all,
Again I wish to express my personal disapointment of not being allowed
direct access to our AS400 ICMS database (worth big, big, bucks-IBM have 24
hr FM ops 
staff looking after everything)so I have being reduced to trying to use
"Screen Scraping"---we use Netsoft Ellite 5.1 as our terminal emulation
product---its rock solid and stable with DDE out--I take the data of the
host screen and paste special link into Excel and use VBA-with send keys 
towards other apps that dont support DDE.

Question 1:Has any Screen scrapers out there built a custom DDE recorder in
VB4,5,6 where the data is placed into a Visual Basic Control or variable
etc?

Question 2:Am I the only guy in the world using this technique?

Question 3:Has anyone had any experiance with NS/Portfolio 3.1--uses OLE
instead of DDE?

Question 4:Has anyone seen any NS/Portfolio toolbox kits in the field-I
have been unsuccesful in finding out any detailed info on this
product==Netmanges web site
only has a small brief on it.

+---
| This is the Midrange System Mailing List!
| To submit a new message, send your mail to MIDRANGE-L@midrange.com.
| To subscribe to this list send email to MIDRANGE-L-SUB@midrange.com.
| To unsubscribe from this list send email to MIDRANGE-L-UNSUB@midrange.com.
| Questions should be directed to the list owner/operator: david@midrange.com
+---