Read chart axis titles from Excel chart programatically

[dpak]

Does anyone know how to read the axis titles from existing excel charts, on excel sheets, using Labview?  I'm guessing that this is possible with Activex, but I can't work out how to do it.

The sheets I am working with come from elsewhere (and I would rather not require them to change their format if I can avoid it) and will have two charts (or more) on the sheet.  I would like to be able to get Labview to read the x and y graph axis titles on all charts on a given sheet.

I have attached a test sheet - note, this is just for testing and is not a copy of one of the real sheets, as these contain confidential information.

Thank you in advance,

David 

[RamonG · Accepted solution]

It is not as straight forward as I had thought, but this seems to work.

[dpak]

Thanks Ramon,

I have been diverted onto something else temporarily ( 😞 ) - So I will try this as soon as I get back to this task.  Thanks again for your help,

Kind regards,

David

[dpak]

Hi Ramon,

Thanks for your solution.  It works!

I also found another way.  xlsx files are simply zip files.  Inside the zip files are a bunch of xml files spread through a small number of folders.  Inside the folder xl\charts, inside the zip file, there are xml files for every chart - CHART1.xml ... CHARTn.xml. The axis labels are stored in these xmls files under a specific tag: XPATH //chartSpace/chart/plotArea/valAx/title/tx/rich/p/r/t.

You do need to strip out the namespaces first.  See in the snippet.

[RamonG]

Hi Dpak,

That seems much more straight forward. You should mark it as solution

[dpak]

Hi Ramon,

Sorry for the delayed response - the university autumn term started and any development like this had to wait until the following summer!  Nothing gets done between October and June normally - except teaching related things.  And, by the summer, there were other fires ... you know how it is.

Your method using the nodes worked well enough for the project I as working on and I had that implemented quickly.

So, even though this is embarrassingly late - I wanted to respond and thank you again.