Display faux spreadsheet on front-panel

[AdamS]

Hey, thanks to all that have been helping me answer all my LV questions. This site is awesome.

My newest question:

I am writing data to a spreadsheet in my program... I recieve a measurement from my scale via rs232... then, I display the data (floating point), the time (string) it was collected, and a comment (string) that the operator enters on the front-panel... They are prompted to "accept the data into spreadsheet"... when they accept, the data gets sent to the Excel file and the indicator boxes for the data, time, and comment go blank.

What I would really like to do is have a "faux spreadsheet" (in addition to the indicator boxes) that displays the data that is sent to my Excel file. It's appearance would be similar to the Excel file. I tried using "build table", but it doesn't seem to accept strings... only numbers. Is there another method I could use?

Next, I need to format the Excel file with column widths, fonts, etc... is the ActiveX control the best way to do this? Any examples out there?

Man, thanks for all the help. This program has taken on a life of it's own (as these automation projects ALWAYS do).

Thanks!

[Dennis_Knutson]

You must have tried the Express Table function. Instead, use the normal table on the control palette. It is a 2D string array. The other way to do it is to embed an actual Excel spreadsheet on the front panel by using an ActiveX container.

Yes, you need to use ActiveX to format the spreadsheet file. NI sells a toolkit that will do this and if you were search the forum for "Excel", you'd find hundreds of posts on the subject and many include example code.