VFP. Trapping COM errors - com

Question

Trapping Excel COM errors from a VFP program.
A program is writing out an extract from several large tables to Excel using Automation.
Typical instructions include :
lCell = "I1234”
.sSheet1.Range(lCell).value = cCust.Name
This generally works fine, but if cCust.name has a value such as ‘=’ (which Excel does not like), this causes an OLE COM error.
Had tried using TRY .. . CATCH . . . ENDTRY to trap this error, but the OLE COM error still reports.
I suppose that I could find out all the possible errors in the data and clean them up, but is there any way of getting Automation to ignore the error and carry on (leaving the field unpopulated)?
Thank you.

Answer 1

I am adding this as an answer, since it contains some code that would otherwise cause a mess. With ON error it is working perfectly fine for me. ie:
*** Constant Group: XlSaveAction
#Define xlDoNotSaveChanges 2
#Define xlSaveChanges 1
Local loExcel As Excel.Application
Local lcValue
loExcel = Createobject('Excel.Application')
loExcel.Workbooks.Add()
loExcel.ActiveWorkbook.SaveAs('c:\temp\ExcelReadTest.xlsx')
loExcel.DisplayAlerts = .F.
*loExcel.Visible = .T.
On Error lcValue = .Null.
With loExcel.ActiveWorkbook.ActiveSheet
.Range('A5').Value = '=Like me'
lcValue = .Range('A5').Value
? m.lcValue
Endwith
On Error
loExcel.ActiveWorkbook.Close(xlSaveChanges)
loExcel.Quit()