The spreadsheets are coming from someone else... I only have Excel 9/2000 and it seems XML is not one of the output formats... not too interested in giving MS more money for something I don't want to use anyway... Thanks for the warning about the empty cell optimization... I'm sure it is helpful for large, sparse spreadsheets, but at least it looks way better than the contorted HTML Excel 9 produces... although most of the bizarrest stuff is header boiler plate, and much of it can be ignored for my application... but the HTML version also doesn't export comments....