excel version and Labview

[Greg_Shipley]

I am using LV 6.1 and Win2000 and MS Office 2000. I have created a simple form in Excel that I populate with data through Labview. Has anyone ran into problems with versions of Excel? i.e. what version of Excel do I need to create my spreedsheet in so all version of Excel can access it when I call Excel through Labview?

[Skegsy]

Greg

in the past I have always used write to spreadsheet file.vi , then Changed the file extension from .txt or .xcl in the file dialog .This might not be possible if dealing with lots of rows of data . I have heard of conflict problem between difrent version of excel .
There is something about this in the FAQ section .

[Michael_Munroe]

You can create your Excel form in Excel 97 or later. The incompatibility between Excel 95 and 97 workbook files caused major frustration for a lot of Excel users. Since Excel 97, all workbooks are transparently compatible. Newer features not supported by older versions are now ignored without error.

There is still an incompatibilty with the ActiveX interface between Excel 97/2000 and XP/03. You will need two different compilations of your program to work with all versions.

Michael Munroe
Certified LabVIEW Developer
www.abcdefirm.com

[Dave_Kaufman]

Are there any differences between Excel XP/02 and XP/03? Would I need 2 different compilations for these 2 versions? I believe XP/02 is object library version 10 and XP/03 is object library version 11.

[Liz F]

Hello,

From research on Microsoft's web page, and working with 2002 and 2003 versions of the Office programs, I would agree with you. I think that it would require two compilations, because the ActiveX controls are different versions as well.

Hope this helps!
Liz F
National Instruments

[Joe_Guo]

For the Excel (.xls) file itself. If it is created with Excel97, then there should be no problem of opening it in any later version of Excel.

Normally, when you use Excel components in your VI to create or read Excel file, you need to re-compile for each version of Excel. However, we have been successful so far to compile the VI using Excel 97 and be able to use it under Excel 2000 and XP. My guess would be if the VI is compiled with a lower version Excel, it would (or most of the time) work with later Excel version.

Joe

[Dave_Kaufman]

It seems insane to me that all of the LabView code needs to be rewritten every time MS comes out with a new version of Excel. Is there any way around this? Is this also a problem when working directly with VBA instead of LabView?

[Dennis_Knutson]

You have to blame Microsoft for changing the ActiveX interface every time they release a new version of Excel. If you wrote a VB or C++ program that used properties and methods of one Excel version and those properties and methods changed with a newer version of Excel, you would have the same sort of problem. The way to go would be to create different Excel interfaces separate from your main program and dynamically load the different VIs based on what version of Excel is installed. You still have to do extra coding but it would be isolated to just the Excel portion.

[Joe_Guo]

NI could do a better job of using conditional code (as in labview PDA) so the code is prepared for different versions of Excel. You can use different versions of Excel on your computer, can't you?

Joe