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Just a technicality - Sesame does have its own report "generator". It generates a document in a common standard format (HTML). What Sesame does not have "built-in" is its own HTML renderer. In fact, the upcoming new report format (non-HTML), uses the exact same report generator as the HTML reports - the main difference is that it's output is not a document - but a rendered image of the report.

The main purpose of a non-rendered standard format for reports is that it produces a document which is completely device independent. It can be "rendered" on any printer or screen from any OS, and transmitted and stored on any of thousands of devices, used in tens of thousands of programs. Or, for that matter, translated into dozens, maybe hundreds, of other standard formats. A Sesame report can even be accessed from ODBC as a data source.

Hi Mark.....

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  As you know I have been playing with ODBC (in Access/Word/OpenOffice/QuickBooks) linking to Sesame and you are probably not surprised to see my question here.

Can you provide us with an example of how a Sesame(or any other) HTML file would be used as a data source?  I can understand how to attach the file as an ODBC source, but I don't know how the calling program would parse it. 

I don't need all the details, but enough so that I can try this out, call a test file and do something with the results. 

How does this page need to be formatted?.
Would the file need to be limited to cells for example?   
Will the HTML file need to be parsed by another engine into a text file or can ODBC work with it directly?
Are special ODBC tags needed to be included in the report?
Is a special ODBC driver needed to convert the HTML info into SQL processing? If yes, who has one?

My ODBC experience has been limited to calling in database tables, spreadsheets, and other ascii/delimited files.  So I am really interested about the extra HTML coding and tags that would have to be utilized/ignored.  Thanks again for listening.