Reporting from a SQL Dbase, concept help.

Hi,

I have developed a small app that saves info into a SQL database. Its actually a questionnaire type application where designated team leaders can create questionnaire records and assign participants, then the participants can drop onto the page and complete the questions, the app saves each answer to a database table.

The main functionality required after this is reporting. At the moment, I have a pre-defined Excel template that has some quite fancy reports and graphs on. When the team leader reports on a completed questionnaire, I am launching excel on the server, opening the template file, dropping some data from the SQL table into a rawdata sheet that feeds all the excel reports, then saving the file with a predefined filename to a predefined path. I am then giving the user a hyperlink to the relevant excel file.

This all works fine, apart from the obvious issues surrounding launching unattended instances of excel on the server. Its taken alot of farting about with Dcom and other stuff to get this working correctly, and I can still not kill the excel process against a specif user once I have finished creating the report. I have tried excel.quit in my code but this doesn't work.

Anyway, this short term solution works, but I am now thinking about future development into a more stable and scalable solution. So, can anybody suggest better methods for doing this. What is the best solution for this ? Could I stream the data to the client and open excel client side, do I use infopath or some other reporting tool instead ?

Any advice mush appreciated ! I can make the existing solution available if needed.

Thanks
Bob