Excel not opening when called by report generation toolkit

[rolfk]

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@AeroSoul wrote:

TBH i try to avoid using RGT because i encountered so many issues with it. Recently i started using Carya PDF toolkit and i have to say i'm lovin it. Can't do excel reports tho, afaik.

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Yes I got the Toolkit in the past for a project. Worked flawlessly although getting the layout right (customers can be sometimes so picky 😁) was quite a bit of tinkering with document formats. That's not the fault of the Toolkit though, RGT is in that respect not better if you need to have a specific layout.

Other advantages: The Carya PDF Toolkit is pretty lean and self contained (no failing because Excel wasn't installed (properly)).

And no you can't do Excel reports, but that is an advantage: It's a lot less simple to tamper with the report. An Excel Report can be opened by anyone and altered if he has Excel installed. PDF editing requires quite specialistic tools that your average production floor worker probably doesn't have. It could even be protected with signing too, but I never bothered about going that far.

[DavidBoyd]

If only I could get away from Excel.  Present employer uses it for data recording and analysis.  While I can (and do) use the XLR8 toolkit for getting data into a workbook, I still need Excel installed and the RGT to invoke an analysis macro, and also curiously, to re-save the XLS file with a password - XLR8 doesn't support passwording classic XLS.

At least I've gotten us away from needing one of those PDF-creation packages.  I created a should've-been-in-the-RGT helper VI which invokes the Excel (or Word) version of "Save As Fixed Format", which natively supports PDF (or, yuck, XPS) generation.  So gone are the days of figuring out at runtime "which printer target was the one that made PDFs?".

Dave