Live search of on Excel sheet

[Kvasq003]

I have been working with Labview for over 2 years now but I have little to no experience in data management. I have used C++ or VisualBasic in the past for data management.

What I am trying to do is open an Exel file and actively search through it. For example, (going to use food because that is the easiest) the excel sheet is open with all items on display, user types in "burger" and anything with that name will be shown. So you will get hamburger, cheeseburger, blah blah. When the word is deleted the whole menu will show. There could also be a column with "tags" such as a dessert or sweet. That way if the user knows he is looking for a dessert but sure exactly what he can do a vague search.

This is just an example; I am not working on some automated menu. I have Googled and checked the examples, but the best I can find is a way of displaying my excel sheet in Labview. Any hint, tricks, or examples that might save me some time will be greatly appreciated. I appreciated all the help and much thanks in advanced.

[nathand]

Excel exposes a huge number of functions through an ActiveX interface. You'll need to experiment, and search through the MSDN documentation, to find the functions that do what you want. It looks like most of the Excel examples that ship with LabVIEW use the Report Generation Toolkit, which may not have the functions you want; there's also a "Write Table to XL" example that shows how you can interact directly with Excel, although the coding style is not ideal. Somewhere between those examples though you should see enough to get started.

[Bob_Schor]

"When All You Have is a Hammer, Every Problem Becomes a Nail".

Why are you trying to create an interactive Excel-based Database using LabVIEW?  It can (probably/possibly) be done, but you would have (a) a very messy, complicated, hard-to-maintain, hard-to-develop piece of LabVIEW code, and (b) even if it (mostly) works, it is almost certain to be slow an inefficient.

There are numerous other ways to "get the experience" that you want that do not use LabVIEW.  Think carefully if you really want to do this with LabVIEW, and why.

BS

[Kvasq003]

Well my idea is as I posted above. A list of items who are sorted by name and a description or tags.

The user finds the one he is looking for. Confirms it and the computer sends a string or some type of information via serial port to a receiver. Where the receiver processes it the information and does whatever it has to.

[tst]

At the end of this idea, you can find an example which shows how to search and filter a 1D list. You can try adapting that to do what you want.