I just bought the Excel 2003 VBA programmer's reference and it's of absolutely no use to me. How to use VB6 with Excel is one of the sales pitches. i just need to know once i've instantiated my excel object and am populating my fields how to format. ie width, numeric formats cell merging etc. the examples in the textbook don't work.

What is the result? (“ . . . don’t work” could mean “generates an error,” “does nothing at all” or “locks up the machine, necessitating rebooting.”)

You might be missing some simple issue that will open new vistas for you...

check out http://www.greggriffiths.org/webdev/both/excel/ which has some good examples of the ASP->Excel interaction which is almost identical to the VB->Excel one.