Thanks for your advice on this matter, I'm actually using Excel 2003!! so it shows how much i know!
i did manage to get the prog to run with the line xl.Application.Run("CTP.xla!sheet1.CTP") but it didn't do anything... i'm guessing it is along the lines of wht you were saying earlier about big output being the active worksheet. I'll give that a go now Thanks for the advice Mike -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list