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Best Report Generation Solution for systems not on Internet

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Hello,

 

We have several LabVIEW-based test rigs that typically use the Report Generation Toolkit for Microsoft Office and a copy of MS Word to generate our test reports.  It has the advantage that the template for the reports are typically created beforehand in MS Word anyway and so integrating the report format into the test rig is very simple.

 

Over the last few years this solution has become less attractive because our test rigs usually cannot be on the network/internet, and over time Microsoft has made it harder and harder to install a copy of Office that is stand-alone and does not require the internet.  Our solution is typically to either buy a license on Amazon that is stand-alone (this is getting harder to find), or waiting until the computer starts complaining that it needs to be on the internet to verify the license, and then connect it to the internet for a little while.  I learned once that if Office starts complaining about not being on the internet and you ignore the complaints, the end result is not being able to print Word documents from LabVIEW which is kind of an important part of report generation.

 

I know of some Alliance members that are frustrated with this also, and there has to be many others out there that share this struggle.  I have looked at Open Office and there is a LV toolkit that someone tried to build for it, but it didn't seem to work that well, so that doesn't seem to be a viable alternative.

 

So I am wondering if anyone out there has found a solution to this problem, figured out an alternative to MS Office, or if there is a better way to do report generation as a whole.  I would love to hear how many people out there are struggling with this same issue also.

 

I look forward to any and all comments!

 

Thanks,

Trevor

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Solution
Accepted by topic author Canuck68

There is a PDF report generation toolkit using iTextSharp created by J-M that I've used in the past and has worked great.

 

A few years ago, I swapped to just making PDF templates and adding fields to be populated by the test... then calling iTextSharp directly to populate the fields and save the resulting PDF. I attached a couple of VIs in this post which will do that.

Note: newer versions of iTextSharp required changes to the code that J-M pointed out in the linked thread. I don't recall what changes I had to make, but it was fixable.

 

Either way, I haven't ever gone back to MS report generation toolkit. PDFs overall make better reports

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My company would never pay for a MS Office or Word license for an ATE system. 

 

Our production test group creates PDF reports exclusively.

 

I believe they are using Exaprom PDF

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=== Engineer Ambiguously ===
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Wow this is great!  And best of all there is no more tether to a MS Office license!!!

 

Thanks for the reply.


Trevor.

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