Excel icon flahsing on taskbar

[jyang72211]

I am using the report generation toolkit.  When I open and close a wookbook, the excel icon flahses on the taskbar.  How can I get rid of that?  Thanks!

[Eric_NI]

Hi jyang72211, doing some google search it seems that this is related to Microsoft, but what is the Office version, LabVIEW version, Report Generation Toolkit version; did this behavior just started? worked fine before? When you use the report generation do you have another document open or is it the one you are writing data to?

Eric NI

[jyang72211]

This is actually a standard behavior.  On the taskbar, it is showing that the excel application opens and close in a very fast rate, since that's what I am doing in the program.  Is there a way to hide this?  When my program modify a excel sheet, a random user can see the application opens, and he can use the applicaiotn, which will mess up my program.

I want LabVIEW to hide my excel access. 

Window 7, LabIVEW 2011, Office 2010

[DianeS · Accepted solution]

 You can set the "visible" property of the Excel application reference to "False".

I don't typically use the report generation VIs, so I expect you'll have to modify whichever one opens the Excel app reference and save it by a different name.  I pretty much always interact with Excel directly using ActiveX, so I'm not sure which VI you'll have to modify.

[jyang72211]

That's very nice.  It worked perfectly.  I just went into that rountine and changed it for good.  You mentioend that you use active x exclusively without the report generation toolkit.  Why is that?  Isn't that a lot of extra work? 

I am wondering is there a way to mix active x and report generation toolkit.  I know that you can extract the active x reference from the report class.  However, I don't know how to convert an active x reference into a report class.  I would like a way to use active x first and report generation toolkit later.  Do you you know how?

Thank you!

[MoReese]

It's extra work, but it gives you a lot more control over the application; whereas, the RGT works well, but you must work within the confines of the function.  It's good for doing basic things, if you don't want to get to fancy (which I don't and use it quite often).  But I also see the power of using Active X.

[DianeS]

To be very honest, it's mainly because I wrote a lot of my own Excel read/write functions using ActiveX before I had the Report Generation toolkit, and since I'd already written them... 

I also agree with Reese about it just being more flexible.  Since I understand the code I wrote, it's not an enormous job for me to make it do anything I want.  When I don't know how to do something, I drop by the MSDN website and look up whichever method / property I want to work with.  So writing my own ActiveX functions to interface with Excel gives me more flexibility and a lot of reusable code.

My two cents!