Microsoft reporting

[Paul_Hanley]

Can I use Microsoft Publisher for reporting in LabVIEW?

[ghighuphu]

I think, you cannot.

The MS Office reporting ToolKit is better that the built-in basic functions http://sine.ni.com/nips/cds/view/p/lang/en/nid/209050 and a white paper here http://www.ni.com/white-paper/3201/en/ , but it does not claim generating Publisher Documents.

Anyway, isn't MS Publisher an oevrkill? What is your intent? Do you want to automatise creating broschures? Like creating similar documents with the same layout, but differing colur or fonts? Because MS Publisher has a focus on layout and not on content, it may be easier jut to copy-paste some content from the MS Word document generated by LabVIEW.

Cheers,

[Paul_Hanley]

I'm looking to program LabVIEW to use an Epilog LASER printer to etch Serial Numbers, issue numbers etc onto our product. The Table size is 32" x 20". Word does not allow me a page size that big and is not always accurate with the print position. Publisher however allows the page size and gives me more scope to position correctly. As you say my focus is on layout and not content.

[ghighuphu]

Thank you for the explanaition, dear Paul!

I would then say, that LabVIEW is an overkill for the job. If batch processing serial numbers is your goal, then you are better off with Publishers native solutions such as Visual Basic Scripting or even linking to an Excel file might do the job, such in the description here: http://office.microsoft.com/en-001/publisher-help/add-tracking-numbers-to-gift-certificates-or-coupo... I am sure your printer does support other file formats; then other tools suitable for batch and repetitive tasks are: LaTeX, Python, GIMP.

Apropos: Why not generate a PDF or PS (EPS) file from your Word Document and scale it up to to a wished size. You don't loose details due to a vector nature of the formats.

Good luck!

[Paul_Hanley]

Thank you for all your ideas. It may take me some time to go through them all and try them out.

I was using LabVIEW to position the printer table (another problem in itself) and make a custom GUI to make the process easier for our operators. I tried the Word reporting and had a small amouint of success and was hoping to make the process easier / more robust by using publisher. Is there a way to point to files (other than word or excel) and print them out in LabVIEW?

Again, thank you for your response.

[ghighuphu]

I thought sending a file to the printer is a single straight-forward task / command using their driver (such as "print, center and scale to full available width"), but now I see that you had to program your own print dialogue.

ad printing any file: Is the following document any help for you? http://digital.ni.com/public.nsf/allkb/4334712A8AFB989E86256514006DDC69