need help with writing to an excel database from labview ??

[dazzooo]

hi 

im doing a colage project, i want to create a excel database using labview,

for example when the start or stop button on the front panel is pressed, i want the time the start button was pressed at and a description e.g. Start button pressed 

i cant seem to find an example of this, or can you log boolean values in excel, all examples seems to be arrays ????

the plan is to log this data in excel creating a database and maybe using labview report generation toolkit to build reports ????

any people with any examples or advice to help get me started ???

thanks  

[aeastet]

Look through this fourm page it has a lot of good help for this kind of thing.

http://forums.ni.com/t5/BreakPoint/Excel-Board/td-p/379682

[Phil_]

Are you sure you mean database? in Excel?

If a .CSV file will be ok (opens in Excel, looks just like a normal worksheet) you can use the 'Write To Spreadsheet File.vi'

Have a look at the attached. (I may have oversimplified your problem)

[dazzooo]

thanks for the help ?

was hoping to write stright to a tdms file, want people to be able to open the excel file without any problems ??

i am hoping to log the activities of the controls on the front panel of my vi, and also the 32 inputs from my daq or will this be too complicated to do ??

is there any easy way of doing this or what would be the best option  ??

or is there any example vi's ??

thanks

[Phil_]

I've not used TDMS before, but it looks pretty straight forward.

I believe you need some kind of Excel plugin to be able to open TDMS files in Excel without any trouble.

As far as the best way of doing it. I would go for an event driven producer consumer pattern (one loop with events for your UI, one loop to handle your DAQ and one loop for your data processing). Then log your UI interaction within the event loop, and log your DAQ stuff in the processing loop (after having passed the data across via the queue)

Once you have your program laid out nicely, the logging shouldn't be too hard. http://www.ni.com/white-paper/3023/en