Like it or loathe it, Microsoft Excel is heavily used for storing, recording and analysing lots of data and many LabVIEW programmers must find they need to get data into or out of Excel. However LabVIEW lacks the ability to read and write Excel files directly. It is possible to exchange data with Excel via ActiveX automation, but this:
- requires Excel to be installed on the same computer as the LabVIEW application
- is not cross platform
- is complicated to do
- does not appear to work reliably across different versions of Excel
The Report Generation Toolkit allows creation of Excel files but this costs extra and is not cross platform.
Many software packages can read data directly from Excel .xls files (e.g. Umetrics SIMCA-P) and presumably it is therefore also straightforward to write data out in Excel .xls format. Native LabVIEW functions for reading and writing .xls files - for example, into string arrays - would be very useful. It would not be necessary to support formatting, charts etc - although some kind of basic formatting support might be useful.
Of course it is possible to exchange data with Excel via delimited files (comma- or tab-separated values) but the .csv format requires characters such as quote marks, commas and carriage returns in a string to be escaped so that they are not incorrectly interpreted as part of the file structure. Tab-separated files suffer less from this problem but on Windows at least, files with a .tsv extension are not automatically associated with Excel whereas .csv files are. It would be helpful if LabVIEW also had native functions for reading and writing .csv files with correct escaping for Excel.
