I'm writing a vb app that gets data over the comm port, manipulates the data, and then stores the data in Excel. My error occurs when I format the columns in Excel. I use the With statement to set the width of the first 10 columns. This works fine the first time I open Excel. However, if I close Excel and then open Excel (from within my app) I get "Run-time error '1004': Method 'Columns' of object '_Global' failed". If I get rid of the With statement and precede all my column format lines with the ExcelSheet object name then everything works ok.