XLR8

[p0rter2000]

I am in the process of evaluating the Excel toolkit XLR8. I am curious if anyone has any experience using

it and if they have run into any issues. Particularly, if there are any issues using it in built applications (exe's).

Thanks for any insight you can provide.

[Bob_Schor]

I realize this does not answer your question (sorry), but I've had excellent results using the Excel functions in the Report Generation Toolkit in compiled LabVIEW Executables.  

BS

[p0rter2000]

I appreciate your response. I had been using the Report Generation Toolkit for about 5 years with no problems with LabVIEW 8.6, WinXP and Excel 2003. We decided to upgrade to Win7, Excel 2010 and LabVIEW 2014. After the upgrade I have had nothing but problems with Excel hanging when writing data to the files. It doesn't happen all the time, but it seems to happen more often in the Run-Time environment. 

[Bob_Schor]

I'm running Windows 7 x64, Excel 2010, LabVIEW 2012.  We have a Real-Time application that involves presenting behavioral trials, where each trial has about 90 parameters (timing, number of stimuli, time between stimuli, which stimuli, character of stimuli, etc.).  Our Workbook has three WorkSheets that we call System (read-only, not to be changed by Experimenter, describes the environment), Experiment (constants for the Experiment, such as Subject Name, name of Device Configuration file, read-only, single column) and Trials (multiple rows of 90-some columns, each row being a Trial, most columns contain Trial Parameters, but about a dozen are designed to hold output from the Trial (such as the number of samples taken, and the LabVIEW identifier of the data).

We can read and update a Trial row in about 100 msec, so it has negligible effect on our experiments.  We run from a compiled executable, so that's no problem, either.  Our analysis programs have no trouble reading from the Workbook (all three sheets).

We've been using this system for several years, never had any problems with it.

I recently began porting this code to LabVIEW 2014 (on a test PC).  We've run several test experiments, and it continues to perform flawlessly.

We're not doing too much "fancy stuff" in Excel -- no graphs, for example.  We do, however, read/write individual rows on the Trials sheet, as well as create "cross-reference" worksheets to help LabVIEW find the data (we have a sheet we call "Definitions" that lists the name of all of the LabVIEW variables held on the Workbook, the sheet on which the variable "lives", the cell containing the variable name, and the first cell containing the variable data).  About the fanciest thing I do is to temporarily change the font of the active Trial row to Bold Red to help the Experimenter see it if it is open in another Window.

Almost all of the code is done with functions right in the Toolkit -- only rarely do I need to use ActiveX "hooks".

Bob Schor

[p0rter2000]

Bob,

Again, I appreciate your feedback.

My code was very simple as well. All of the functions were directly from the toolkit. The issues always arise during a write. Sometimes during a write a window will pop-up with "save a copy as". Doesn't happen all the time. If you check task manager

in between writes, sometimes Excel is not closed properly for some reason.

Reading the spreadsheets works just fine.

[Bob_Schor]

Yes, there's a bug (reported to NI).  Send me an e-mail (through the Forums -- include an e-mail address so I can reply) and I'll give you the details.  Some of my "utility VIs" might solve your problem.

BS

[p0rter2000]

Bob-

PM sent.

[RTSLVU]

I also evaluated XLR8, here is a copy of a email and demo I sent to my colleagues

Benefits:

1. Excel does NOT need to be installed on target machine
   1. Due to MS Office licensing costs all our recent test machines are coming with Open Office
2. Does not use ActiveX calls.
   1. ActiveX can be problematic due to differing Windows versions and configurations
3. Creates actualXLS orXLXS files.
   1. Some people get confused when I send them a .CSV file
4. Creates workbooks with multiple sheets.
   1. Saves a lot of time combining multiple files into a workbook for long term tests
5. Writes time stamps in OLE (Excel) format that can be formatted in Excel, not LabView time format.
   1. See http://forums.ni.com/t5/LabVIEW/UTC-time-to-OLE-date/td-p/729401?query.id=150077
6. Can and do all the little things we constantly do in Excel
   1. conditionally color cells
   2. freeze pane so row 1 stays put when you scroll
   3. auto-size columns so big numbers or timestamps  don’t look like ######### when you open the file

The only caveat I have found is it does not lock the open file like using LabView Open File vi.

So if you open the data file while LabView is running, LabView will crash next time it tries to write to the file due to a sharing violation.

I contacted Data Ahead and they told me “File Lock” will be available in the next update.

I have created an annotated demo program to show off the ease of use and my most wanted features.

Since this is a demo of the toolkit it will not allow me to make an EXE or source code distribution so to run the demo:

1. Install theXLR8 tool kit demo throughVPIM.
   1. If you don’t have VPIM installed or have never used it  follow the instructions here http://www.ni.com/gate/gb/GB_EVALTLKTXLR8DATA/US
2. Unzip the attached files and  open xlr8-Demo.vi in LabView and run it. I saved it in LV 2013 as I assume we are all at that version.
3. Open the created file in Excel and notice how many things are already done that you do all the time in Excel
   1. A workbook containing multiple sheets is created.
   2. Cells with values >19 are colored red
   3. Top row (column headers) is frozen when you scroll
   4. Column 1 is auto sized

[p0rter2000]

RTSLVU,

Thanks for the demo! I will check it out.

I appreciate your insight.