Possible cause of "Cannot open Excel file error"?

[Maxime]

Hi!

Here's my problem: one of our LabView applications creates .xls Excel files.  However some of these files are too big to be opened into Excel, so we need to open these files in DIAdem to analyse the data (in fact, even the smaller ones often need to be analysed in DIAdem).  The problem is that DIAdem seems totally unable to open Excel files, small or big, created by our LabView application or not.  The error message appearing when we try to import Excel files is "Cannot open Excel file"... which doesn't give any clue about the cause of the error.   My question is: what may cause this error to occur?  I searched both the help and the website without finding useful information.

The computer is running on WinXP with OfficeXP installed, and we are using DIAdem 9.0.  If additionnal information is required, just let me know.

Thanks in advance!

Maxime B.

[AndreasH_Ha]

Hi Maxime,

Did you check whether the file is opened by another application ? If you already checked this, please send one of the files so that I can check whether there is a general problem.

One thing I have seen in the past is that files have the extension xls but are csv files internally. The Excel import is meant to import the binary Excel xls format. If you provide one of the files I can check it for you.

Andreas

[Maxime]

Hi!

I did some experiments this morning.  First of all, the file I had created using Excel that I tried to open yesterday just opened.  I don't know why it didn't work yesterday, but, for now, it's working.  Now, for my LabView-created files, I still get the same error message.  However, if I open the files in Excel and try to save, a warning message appears, saying that the file may not be compatible with the text (separator:tabulation) format.  If I ignore the warning and save the file as a .xls file, I can now import it into DIAdem.  The problem is probably that my LabView-created files are not "real" .xls files.  Now, this is a problem, because I can't open some of the bigger files in Excel without having the data truncated (Excel has a maximum of 65536 rows); last year, using DIAdem 8.X (I don't remember the exact version we had), I could open those files without any trouble... Is there any way to get those files to be opened with DIAdem 9.0?  I attached one of those files if it may help.

Thanks!

Maxime B.

[AndreasH_Ha]

Maxime,

I looked into the file and its really a CSV file using tabs as delimiter. You could read this file with the ASCII import Wizard instead of the Excel import. See the picture below to see how the data looks like in DIAdem.

If you can use DIAdem 9.1, then DataPlugins could be an alternative. Your file format looks pretty clear so it would be easy to create a DataPlugin to read your files. With that you could drag&drop the files into DIAdem and all data and descriptive elements (e.g. the THD values) would be available without effort.

Please let me know which option you prefer

Andreas

[Maxime]

Thanks for the reply!

In the last days, I had no free time to gather information about DataPlugins.  However, I've tried the ASCII import wizard, and it works correctly, so we'll stick to that method for now. 

Maxime B.