Darren's Occasional Nugget 05/13/2014

[Darren]

Having the ability to generate PDF files from LabVIEW is a rather common request. I recently discovered a very simple way to generate PDFs from LabVIEW with a quick modification to some existing NI software. First, you must have the following products installed:

• LabVIEW 2009 or later
• LabVIEW Report Generation Toolkit for Microsoft Office 2009 or later
• Microsoft Word 2007 or later

If you have all of this software, then open vi.lib\addons\_office\_wordsub.llb\Word_Save_Document.vi and make the following modification:

More specifically, add the ".pdf" case with a value of "17" inside. Now, if you wire the path to a PDF file to the Save Report to File.vi for a Word report, then a PDF file will be generated:

We will try to get this change into the Report Generation Toolkit in a future version. I realize that this trick doesn't solve all the use cases (like PDF generation on a system without Word installed), but I'm hoping that it can help out some people today.

[UliB]

Hello Darren,

I wonder if this tricks works for a Excel report as well.

UliB

[bienieck]

Or if you don't have Report Generation Toolkit for Microsoft Office (which, I think, is not so cheap) you can just simply install PDF Creator and use it as a printer in Easy Text Report.vi 🙂 Solution with some faults but cheaper...

[Darren]

---

@UliB wrote:

I wonder if this tricks works for a Excel report as well.

---

Yes, I was able to get it to work with Excel with a similar edit to vi.lib\addons\_office\_exclsub.llb\Excel_Save_Workbook.vi. Some things to keep in mind:

• For Excel 2010 and later, the numeric value inside the ".pdf" case would be 57.
• For Excel 2007, I think you would need to first install the Microsoft Save as PDF or XPS add-in.
• For Excel 2007, I think the numeric value inside the ".pdf" case would be -1.

I'm not 100% sure about the Excel 2007 scenario, because I didn't have a test machine available to try it out. But for Excel 2010 and later, it definitely works.

[happy_learning]

run this vi，i have an error code 1498,how to solve it

[billko]

---

@happy_learning wrote:

run this vi，i have an error code 1498,how to solve it

---

How does this have anything to do with this thread?  Go to the main menu of the LabVIEW forum and click on the "New Message" button located to the left, just above the list of topics.

[zou]

---

@happy_learning wrote:

run this vi，i have an error code 1498,how to solve it

---

Have you installed the Report Generation Toolkit?

[GregFreeman]

Seeing as the RGT is LVOOP based, technically you could just extend it without having to modify existing toolkit funcitonality, which would then break if someone loaded the code on a different machine without this instance of the "save" in vi.lib

[Darren]

FYI to anyone still following this thread, I'm happy to announce that these changes have made it into the Report Generation Toolkit for LabVIEW 2015 and later.

[viScience]

Yes great, thanks a million Darren.  I am using this capability to save excel pdf files using the RGT.  My only problem is that it does not seem to save multipage workbooks.  Is there a workaround for this?