How to embed information data and retrieve it from other applications

[Lost User]

How to embed information data and retrieve it from other applications? I have a proprietary data file format that contains graphical data. I would like to embed customer and job related data and be able to extract the data to display in other applications (i.e. Excel). I would assume I could place the data in my file format anyway I want. But how does Excel or other application extract this data. Do I write a DLL with functions to extract the fields of information? I’m open to any ideas but I’m limited to VC++ 6.0 (no .NET, C#) Many thanks in advance Tony Teveris

[JohnnyG]

Just curious but does it have to be embedded? Because you could create an external comma delimited file or even an HTML file and use Excel, etc. easily. I found that comma delimited and HTML are more universal than a propietary data format.

[Ramu Pulipati]

Yes, you can do it. To be specific it should be ATL COM Dll which implemenets IDExtensibilty2 interface. This COM dll will be loaded when excel comes up. When user chooses to open the selected file, a notification will be fired by excel application to all the listners of IAppEvents. At this stage, component should read from file and stuff it in Excel columns. Check out more for COM add-in dlls in Office applications. Hth, Ramu

[Lost User]

I want the data embedded because the file gets move around alot by the user, backups, floppy, etc. Learning from the past it's better to keep the data all together. I will agree csv and the like are easy to use. Thanks for your thoughts Tony