on second thought

On second thought another way to handle the c++ -> calc connection would be to use swig to enable python to call c++. This way the spreadsheet could be used to handle both input and output. So... the next experiment is to call python functionality from inside of calc.

And it turns out it's easy. Just put the python program into:
c:/Documents and Settings/dave/Application Data/OpenOffice.org2/user/Scripts/python
and it is available as a macro. Need to play with this a little to see if it really suits my needs.

Still need to see if I can get swig to work with the python that comes with open office.

This may be a problem. The swig documentation implies that you need version compatibility between the python executable and the swig code for swig to work.

Yes this is a problem. I can't yet even compile the swig examples because the python included with open office is not a complete developement environment. Or at least I can't find the Python.h include file needed to compile the swig examples.