LabVIEW Report Generation Toolkit for Microsoft Office runtime consistency check

[michele.santucci]

Hallo,

I'm going to deploy on a large number of different PCs a test application made by LabView 2013 and using Report Generation Toolkit for Microsoft Office, the application will run compiled.

In the last months I learned that the only chance for this application to run smoothly is to work into an environment much like that where is been compiled (Office version/bitness, runtime version etc).

Unluckly is hard to predict which version of Office is installed in each of these PCs and it's also difficult to predict a not working behaviour because sometimes it simply doesn't create the report, some other time it just crashes the application.

I can build the application on different workstation to offer a broader range of setup to use but this doesn't fix the problem of failure detection.

My question is:

 How can I check if the Office version installed on the target machine is the same as the one the application binary have been compiled with?

Best regards,

 Mike

[aeastet]

If you need to work with different version of Excel I would look into OpenPyXL. It is python code the is open source that you can tap into using LabVIEW to open and save excel files. It also does not required MS Office to be installed in order to work. We have started looking into switching out all of our active X and .net features to this library to remove the Office requirement. 

https://openpyxl.readthedocs.io/en/stable/

We have built an interface to this python code inside of LabVIEW that allows us to do what we want. You could do the same thing. It would also make it so the version of Office does not matter any more:

[Bob_Schor]

If you look in the LabVIEW Tools Network (which you can open with the VI Package Manager that should have been installed when you installed LabVIEW), you can find the "Viewpoint Xlsx Toolkit for LabVIEW" which (a) doesn't need Microsoft Excel to be installed, and (b) might have all the capability you require.  There may be a license fee, but it has a free "Evaluation" period.  Other packages might also be available ...

Bob Schor