Free, spreadsheet style grid.  Does such a thing exist?  I have reviewed a number of different grids and gotten a feel for limitations etc....

Listed at end of this email.

Here is what I was (am) looking for;


1.) Ocx, DLL style control that will run on VB 4.0  (yes I know many will scream at me to upgrade, but due to current constraints this is not possible for me
and won't be for quite a while - funny, even when I state this upfront I still get replies that tell me to just 'do that anyhow'.  I cant do that at the moment so please
dont suggest it. I already KNOW this, but I cant upgrade due to the constraints....


2.) Grid that can appear like a normal spreadsheet on a form and will allow direct entry into cells

3.) Will allow me to specify specific cells by some sort of cell coordinate scheme, i.e.  Xgrid1.row = 1, xgrid1.col = 1

4.) Will allow me to change the background colour of any cell in the grid

5.) Will let me customize the number of rows, columns - but only need this to a limited degree, 100 rows by 100 columns is fine, 400 by 400 better, but no more
than that is needed

6.) Will let me assign cell values to variables and vice versa during runtime

7.) Will let me refer to cell values in one grid to those in a secondary grid and allow me to inter-operate between the grids

8.) Won't expire or become crippled after some 30 day trial date

9.) Reasonable docs, good enough to follow and get it working.

Thats it, thats all I need to do, dont need any other bells and whistles.... surely there is some reasonable OCX out there, some limited, lite version of some kind
that can perform these simple functions?

Here are some of the grids I've already tried, and have found to be seriously wanting for some reason or another;

vb accelerator
PROBLEM: too limited in features, difficult to easily and quickly do what I need as listed above, limited properties... cant even directly set the number of columns?

easy grid
PROBLEM: Best of the bunch found so far, meets all the requirements above EXCEPT the docs suck.  Has an unreal number of properties, etc.... but so many it makes the darn thing pretty complex, seems to be very robust in utilty but the faq, help file is resplendent in broken English and the docs in general are just plain poor and sketchy, took me far too long to just figure out how to set the # of cols, rows.  Further, it has a 30 day trial period, which the company claims can be avoided by simply turning the computer clock back one month, but I actually NEED the clock to be accurate in time, for what Im doing - so this is not a good solution.

scgrid - still testing this out, but so far does not look promising

ExtendedDataGrid control - part of a pack of other tools, seems limited in function, frustrating to get running

Janus - way out of my price league, great tool, but cant afford to sell one of my organs at the moment to afford it.

DataGrid - too limited in scope, cludgy for what I want to do, too pricey

truegrid and dbgrid - too limited in scope, cludgy for what I want to do

itGrid - too pricey

VSFlex/OCX and VSView/OCX - too pricey

GRID - the one that ships with VB 4.0 - severly limited in capabilities, overall this one just plain sucks


HELP!!??  Any suggestions ?

See answer in VB General Post