Hi David, as far as I can see the system already allocates the exact memory space needed to retrieve range values an no more than this.
Let's explain things this way: when you dimension a variable of type char *AColumnExcel[2000] you are creating a string array capable of 1000 elements, but no space is actually allocated excepct for the few bytes needed for the pointers.
ExcelRpt_ReadData function effectively allocates memory space for the string representation of cell contents, i.e. rows * cols elements of the array (depending on the cell range you have passed to the function) each of them with proper size. This can be seen in the variable screen if you add a breakpoint immediately after the function call. This is why you need to free the strings after you have finished using them.
In any case, you can dynamically allocate the initial array before passing it to ExcelRpt_ReadData this way (reading a range of 12 cells):
char **buf = NULL;
buf = malloc (12 * sizeof (char *));
error = ExcelRpt_ReadData (worksheetHandle, "B2:C7", ExRConst_dataString , buf);
for (i = 0; i < 12; ++i) {
DebugPrintf ("Row %d: %s (%d bytes)\n", i, buf[i], strlen (buf[i]));
CA_FreeMemory(buf[i]);
}
free (buf);
