Reading Excel without ActiveX

[Dobi]

Hello,
I have problems reading from an ExcelSheet with ActiveX. I need this function in several OS, Win98/NT/2000 and different languages. To get an reliable solution, I'm thinking of a workaround by reading the file as text and then decode it to a string array. I can't believe ActiveX is the best and only way, DDE neither! I'm using LV6.0

Thanks for any hint

[Nadav_Chernin]

Excel ActiveX that ships with Office2000 works in Win98/NT/2000.
About different languages - this is a reason why you need ActiveX, because each language that works with ActiveX will understand it.
If you have problems look at example that ships with LabVIEW.

[Jeremy Braden]

The problem with reading a native excel file is that the parsing is not self evident. Microsoft adds codes in the file for special functionality and does not explain how this is done to the rest of the world. Additionally, this format is likely to change with additional releases of Excel.
What you will need to do is to save the file in a known standard format like .csv. This a comma delimited file, so every entry in the row is separated with a comma and the rows end with a carrage return. The great thing is that it would take 20 minutes to create the parsing algorithms in LabVIEW and Excel can still read and save the files.

Jeremy