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Editing Excel sheet within LabVIEW

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Earlier on, it was possible to set up an activeX container and fill it with the excel Spreadsheet object that originated from Microsofts earlier office installations, something called MS Office Web Components 10 or 11. I've been using these for years in many applications, and it gives the possibility for the user to operate matrix data in a very familiar GUI, and also compatible (more or less) with the fullblown Excel tool. An example is shown in the picture attached. This is a much more powerful way of dealing with the excel format within LabVIEW, than just beeing able to read and write the excel-files.

     Problem is, that Microsoft has removed this add-on-tool many years ago, so there has not been any new versions of the Web Components since Office 2003 (or was it 2007?). I can live with that. But the last years, I also see indication that this old component is getting more incompatible with new versions of Office and new operating systems.

   So if anybody has found a better activeX/.Net component that is excel-compatible. and can show the sheet within a container, I'd be very interested. I saw an example on the net, where they used the web-browser object to display the excel-sheet, but of course it failed when I opened it and tried it, not very robust. Any other suggestions ?

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I'm curious, why do you need to edit an Excel sheet within Labview?  Why not just use a CMD prompt to open Excel?  What are the advantages of having an subset of Excel embedded in a VI container? 

aputman
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I have to agree with aputman here as it look like you are using Excel to generate a test sequence. 

 

I have done something simmilar in the past for a department that wanted to use Excel to make "test scripts".

 

What I did was provide an detailed Excel Template (.xltx) they could use to write their tests in Excel.

template.PNG

 

 

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=== Engineer Ambiguously ===
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Solution
Accepted by topic author MartinP

There are several reasons why I want to be able to do this.

Firts; my LabVIEW editor of a test, is an editor that works on an array of clusters, each cluster describing 30-50 parameters needed on each step of the test, numbers, strings and booleans.

The option of pulling this array of mixed data into excel, is an option for the user, it is not

a must. So when the Excel-button is pushed witin the LabVIEW editor, I transfer the array from LabVIEW into

the excel-sheet in the ActiveX container, and the operator can edit it there, or potentially copy it over to the real excel edit it there and copy it back into the ActiveX container. When this editing is over, there is one button in the LabVIEW window that ends the excel editing, and pulls the data back into the LabVIEW editor. Thats the scaenario I have built, to keep everything withing one LabVIEW program. This also enables me to double-check the values when read back into LabVIEW, that they are within legal limits. I do see it is possible to work with Excel outside of LabVIEW, but that is not how I wanted this task to be solved.

 

I have also found the solution to my problem.

It is called Spread by a company GrapeCity, you can see it under http://spread.grapecity.com/

They have a solution both for ActiveX and for .NET.

I have scratched the surface on both, and first indications are that the .NET version seems to have some problems towards LabVIEW, while the ActiveX version seems better.

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