how to use labview front panel to display excel

[xuwenwei]

Hello, 

I want to use Labview Front panel to display excel,

because in  my excel,some cells is merged. so can not use  Multi list box or table control.

so I try to use activeX to link the excel.

it can display the excel, but some of the column is lost , can not to display the whole excel by enlarge the activeX Control

PLS some give some advice:

1. some other solution to display the excel in the front panel

2. help to solve the issue for activeX  to display the whole excel.

[Bob_Schor]

I recommend that you get the Report Generation Toolkit, which allows you to open Excel, itself, from LabVIEW, and allow Excel to display Excel (it really does work).  You might want to use another screen to do this (it's what we did), so you run your LabVIEW program with its Front Panel, with time-varying charts, User Interface, etc., and an opened Excel Workbook (we were using it as a set of "instructions" on the tests we wanted to run, each row being another test, and the LabVIEW code marching down the Worksheet row by row) ...

Bob Schor

[xuwenwei]

hello, Bob: thank you very much that you can answer my question. But I am sorry , where can I find what you have said " Excel to display Excel ". I can not find it. and if you have some example , it will be very useful for me . thanks

[xuwenwei]

[Bob_Schor]

It is as simple as running Create Report from the RGT and passing the Excel Workbook you want to open as a Template, like this:

The Workbook was on my desktop, so I used the Get System Directory function to fill in the path to My Desktop.  Wiring an existing Excel File into Create Report opens Excel, opens the File, and leaves it visible (and right in the middle of your main Screen -- you probably want to get this to open on another screen so it doesn't obscure what you are doing).  I took a screenshot of the result, and also attached both the Snippet and the Excel file.

 Bob Schor

[xuwenwei]

hello, Bob

I am very very thank you much for you can help me.

and I am sorry , I should I haven't explain more clear.

what I want is show the excel in Labview front page , such like a control

I try to show the excel at  Labview front page with ActiveX, but because this excel has column A to column S, I don't know why at ActiveX control , the excel Can lost last 3  column?

could you tell me why?

[Bob_Schor]

I have to confess that when I started using LabVIEW (it's about the 10th programming Language that I learned), and was handed a large LabVIEW Real-Time program designed to study sensory processing in human subjects (specifically Sound Localization), I needed to integrate a large Excel Workbook, with several Worksheets detailing the Experimental Stimuli ("Trial 1, play a Noise Sound Burst for 200 ms at an azimuth of 20°, wait 5 s, illuminate a Laser Pointer to tell the subject to point at the Sound and press a Button, save the Az/El of the Laser Pointer, and go on to the next Trial"), and some columns in one of the Worksheets recording the latency of the Button Press and the location of the Laser Pointer.

Some of the Original Code used ActiveX to manipulate the Excel Workbook and its Worksheets.  What a mess!  I replaced it with the RGT, keeping the relevant WorkSheet showing the Experimental Stimuli opened on a second screen, letting the Experimenter see the Excel Row comprising the current Stimulus, and updating the "Response Columns" of the WorkSheet when the Subject pressed the Response button.  I let Excel do all of the fancy formatting -- all I had to do was let LabVIEW collect the data (which it "knew" how to do) and update (using calls to the Report Generation Toolkit) the opened Excel WorkSheet, and when the Experiment was done, write it back out to disk, saving the "Response Data" that had been written during the Trials.  [Of course, I also wrote separate Data Files recording what happened during the Experiment, including the settings for each Trial that was run, in separate, non-Excel, files -- I made the claim to my colleagues, which they never challenged me to prove, that I could erase the post-Trial Excel Workbook and recreate it entirely from the three Data Files I generated during the Experiment.  The Excel Workbook was an optimal way for a Psychology student, who might not be interested in some of the details of the Subject's response, such as their eye and head movements during the Trial, but only the latency and accuracy of their pointing to the Sound Target in pitch blackness, while the Biomedical Engineers would want to work with the LabVIEW data files with all of the A/D sampling and timing data ...]

So I took the "easy way" of avoiding ActiveX and using the RGT.  I recommend it to you, as I do not plan to add ActiveX to my list of programming paradigms to learn (I'm currently into LabVIEW FPGA ...).

Bob Schor