Exell help

You can use betting assistant (gruss) software.
It has a spreadsheet that continually updates the prices. If you have that running in the
background you can link whatever cells you like in your spreadsheet to the cells that are
updating prices in the gruss spreadsheet.

You can also control how often they update or even suspend updating.

Compound Magic

Any thoughts on how I could do this with an Open Office spreadsheet of my own making without resorting to using third party software such as Gruss?

A few years ago I was able to do it by using betfair.lite but alas that method no longer works, or at least it didn't the last time I tried it a few weeks ago.

Try using Betd*q's version of lite.  That's what I did when Betfair Lite stopped working.

top2rated

Some years ago Betfair had a lab extra's section that had some goodies, one being a spreadsheet
that would do price updating but after updates to Betfair it ran into all sorts of problems
which were discussed in lab chat with no permanent solutions found. Pity that Betfair didn't support those extra's.

Their are a few smart API guys who can do this sort of thing but most want cash for their time
and effort and who can blame them for that.

I think gruss at the yearly price of 60 Pound is very good value and considering that when Betfair updates, gruss also makes any adjustments to their software to accommodate.

Once you have gruss (betting assistant) you can do some amazing things with excel.
Have a look at this video for an example. 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NlJzhmv-4wo&NR=1

In Australia we can't use purple so have no knowledge to part with on how what works.

RichWill's answer maybe a solution for you. I don't know of any other solutions.

Cheers

RichWill & Compound Magic

Thanks for your replies.

thanks for the advice.