Compatibility issues with MS Windows 11(Excel) and Labview 2019

[Malskii]

Our ITgroup upgraded our ATE computers to Windows 11 and now we're having issues with Excel working with Labview 2019. Anyone else feeling the pain????

[RTSLVU]

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@Malskii wrote:

Our ITgroup upgraded our ATE computers to Windows 11 and now we're having issues with Excel working with Labview 2019. Anyone else feeling the pain????

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You need to have a long talk with your IT department. Our ATE systems (and MY LabVIEW development computer) are frozen on Windows 10 because the manufacturer of a certain piece of equipment has not updated their driver DLL since Windows XP and they have no plans of doing so. 

So until IT has a spare $500,000+ in cash to blow replacing test equipment that works fine on Windows 10, our lab will not be upgrading anything to Windows 11.

[altenbach]

Even if no hardware drivers are involved, LabVIEW 2019 itself is not officially compatible with windows 11. (details)

(that said, I run 2020 just fine under windows 11)

[softball]

Hi

RTSLVU says not updating from Windows 10 because a hardware supplier has not updated their driver DLL since Windows XP.

Issue here is that a standard DLL not accessing hardware can be older than XP, even one made for Windows 2000 will work in Windows 10, as long as bitness is respected.

But a driver accessing hardware must be made for Windows Vista or newer to work in Windows 10.

Google rumour based AI says :

No, Windows XP drivers are not compatible with Windows 10, as they are based on different operating system kernels and hardware architectures. You cannot install an XP driver directly onto Windows 10. The best options are to find a modern driver, use a virtual machine to run XP, or upgrade your hardware. 

Regards

PS : There are other issues with older code. Abandoned Microsoft standards, outdated security standards and such. Maybe that is the problem, preventing updating from Windows 10 to 11.

[UliB]

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@Malskii wrote:

Our ITgroup upgraded our ATE computers to Windows 11 and now we're having issues with Excel working with Labview 2019. Anyone else feeling the pain????

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What kind of issues do you have?

At my company IT updated to Win11 and to MS Office 365. After the update we had an issue that a LabVIEW application stopped connecting to Excel via ActiveX.

Long story short: We did a repair of the Office installation and our issues were gone.

[RTSLVU]

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@softball wrote:

Hi

RTSLVU says not updating from Windows 10 because a hardware supplier has not updated their driver DLL since Windows XP.

Issue here is that a standard DLL not accessing hardware can be older than XP, even one made for Windows 2000 will work in Windows 10, as long as bitness is respected.

But a driver accessing hardware must be made for Windows Vista or newer to work in Windows 10.

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Whatever... We use the word "driver" rather loosely here.

What are "LabVIEW Instrument Drivers"?

Sometimes they are just a VI set that the manufacturer provided that uses SCPI commands and VISA. You can just copy to your development computer and go..

Sometimes they are DLL based and require intricate setup programs to install and register the DLL in Windows along with the company's proprietary software. They don't use VISA and inside the VI is nothing but a Call Library Function Node like an IVI driver.

Sometime they are an IVI driver that requires an intricate setup program to install and register the DLL in Windows and the IVI Framework to be installed.

Regardless of what you want to call it this "LabVIEW instrument driver" will not install on Windows 11 even using the "compatibility modes" in Windows.

Interestingly enough if you install it in Windows 10 then upgrade the computer to Windows 11 it works fine. But our IT department is not going to take a new computer that comes with Windows 11, wipe it, install Windows 10, install the "driver", then upgrade to Windows 11.

[Malskii]

I agree with you !00%. I'm not sure I can get my IT department roll back and upgrade. I've attached a screenshot of the error message if anyone might have a possible fix.

[RTSLVU]

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@Malskii wrote:

I agree with you !00%. I'm not sure I can get my IT department roll back and upgrade. I've attached a screenshot of the error message if anyone might have a possible fix.

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Honestly that looks like an ActiveX (or whatever they are calling it now) error. We ran into a similar issue using the NI Excel Report toolkit years ago with programs failing due to minor differences in Excel and/or ActiveX versions.

Not to mention the bizarre MS Office 365 licencing needs to be tied to a user when MS Office all went to a subscription model. Our ATE stations are not tied to a user login on the domain.

We have abandoned writing directly to Excel.

[p0rter2000]

I agree that the error looks like an ActiveX issue. I also had similar issues years ago.

You might check out XLR8. It reads and writes to Excel without using ActiveX

https://dataahead.de/en/xlr8-labview-toolkit-2/

[UliB]

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@Malskii wrote:

I agree with you !00%. I'm not sure I can get my IT department roll back and upgrade. I've attached a screenshot of the error message if anyone might have a possible fix.

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To me, this looks like a difference in the SaveAs method, similar to what is described in this Knowledge Base article:

https://knowledge.ni.com/KnowledgeArticleDetails?id=kA00Z0000019N7CSAU&l=en-US

I know that the SaveAs method has changed between versions because I was also affected by this.

One possible solution is to install the same version of Office on your development computer. Check if you can run your code with this version of Office (you may need to relink the method calls as described in the article) and build a new executable file.