XML Spreadsheets (CGIDEV2) - Progress and Problem

Very good progress with this. Having the SED script to reinsert the control
codes every time the template is enhanced/overwritten has made this a
practical technique.

I've written several reports now and an XML Spreadsheet (xls type) has
several advantages over the .csv files I've been producing hitherto: The
ability to preset the column widths; being able to define a column as text
and thereby stop Excel from "helping" me by changing codes it thinks are
dates or decimal values, but really are just codes (lots of those in the
database); and the ability to "stack" headings two or three words deep
where the code is short but the description is long.

However, there is one fly in the ointment: Numeric fields.

I've figured out that I need to explicitly right-align the column and set
the number of decimals in the template, then use %char() with updHTMLvar()
in the program. The numbers look great, but Excel in a sense can't "see"
them. Summing a column using Autosum produces zero. Selecting several
figures and looking at the status bar there's no sum/avg/max/min available.
It seems that when you type or paste a value into a cell it goes somewhere
that these imported values aren't going.

Has anyone encountered this problem? It's not a show-stopper: If
manipulation of figures is a priority I can still produce a .csv (whose
numbers are fully functional, if ugly), and if presentation is more
important I now have an alternative, but undoubtedly someone is going to
eventually demand both.

Thanks

Arnie