Problems transferring data to Excel

[Martin Stanley]

Hi,
I wonder if anyone could help me. I am reading the contents of a
spreadsheet array and transferring them to Excel using ActiveX. The way I
am doing this is to dump the whole array into excel in one go. I find the
size of the array then convert this size into a range e.g. A1:AH5 etc. To
convert to an excel range I am taking the size of the array, splitting up
the row and col parts, then passing these into the "Row Col to Range Format
VI" that I found in one of the examples, this looks after all the
conversions and produces a string e.g. AH5. I then concatenate this with
the start cell i.e A1: and pass it into the range method of the invoke node.
This all works fine and dumps all the values into excel in the r
ight cells.
The only problem is when I come to graph the numeric data using the chart
wizard. I am graphing two columns X against Y, but excel just draws a set
of values along the X axis and ignores any Y increment. The scale of the
x-axis data is also wrong. Could anyone shed any light on this problem.
What is strange is that I am saving this data to a spreadsheet file as well
and when I open this file and cut and paste the data into excel I can graph
it normally!

Regards,
Martin.

[MaxMar]

Martin:

After reading your post, I was able to duplicate the problem you
describe. I hadn't really noticed it before because I always
poke my data into Excel in numerical (floating point) format.
If you wire a 2D array of floating point values to the "value"
property of the Range object, this problem does not occur. But
if you wire a 2D array of strings, the Y column is indeed not
plotted. Apparently, Excel still considers the data to be
text. You can see this if you change the cell formatting to
numerical and set the number of decimal places. The values in
the cells will not change the number of decimal places showing.
They will also be left-aligned in the cell by default, a sure
indication of text; numerical data is right-aligned. Evidently,
Excel plots X text valu
es (because they are sometimes months,
categories, etc.) and not Y text values.

One of the ways I found you can convert the cells is to select a
column and choose Data>>Text to Column from the Excel menu.
This will convert the text values to numerical format. Another
way to avoid the problem is to pass the Labview Data to the
workbook in numerical format rather than as strings. I am sure
others here probably have different ways of converting the data
using ActiveX. Perhaps they will share. Anyway, hope this
helps.

MaxMar


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