MS office add-on - _exclsub.llb vs excel.llb?

[parkerfly]

We have the MS office report generation toolkit with LabVIEW 8.0 (we're using office 2003), and in learning how to use it I found ...\LabVIEW 8.0\vi.lib\addons\_office\_exclsub.llb - does anyone know where to find the "detailed help" on vi's in that library?  I haven't checked every one, but none of the ones I looked had have the detailed help, just the context help image showing I/O.  It doesn't look like they appear in the right click menu either.

Thanks...

[BrianInTheForest]

I am using 8.2, and I am not sure there is any detailed help for those vi's.  I looked at File>Vi Properties>Documentation and in the Help path box there is nothing. 

[Darren]

The only VIs that will have detailed help are the ones in the palettes.  All the VIs in _excelsub.llb are called dynamically by palette VIs, so nothing in that LLB will have on-line help.

-D

[tst]

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@Darren wrote:

The only VIs that will have detailed help are the ones in the palettes. 

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BTW, Darren, why is that?

Is it that NI doesn't follow the style guidelines and reasonable programming methods of documenting the code itself ( ) or that NI decided that "we are not worthy" and removes the documentation from vi.lib VIs which are not in the palette ( )?

[Darren]

There is a tremendous effort on the part of the LabVIEW Documentation team to provide high quality documentation for every VI a user might drop from the palettes.  If we put that same effort into documenting every single VI that ships with LabVIEW, it would probably be about 10 years before you'd see a new version.

Now if by "documentation" you mean good ol' free labels on the diagrams, then yes, I would agree that many of the "less visible" VIs that ship with LabVIEW are lacking in that area.  And that's something we have to tackle one developer, and consequently one VI, at a time.

-D

P.S. - It would be detrimental to our bottom line if NI removed comments from the diagrams of unlocked VIs in LabVIEW, so we can squash that conspiracy theory right here.  For example, we would be increasing the support burden on our AEs who would have to answer questions on code that otherwise may have had the answers on its diagrams already.

[tst]

Yes, I see how my question could have been misunderstood.
I meant only documenting the code with free text and filling the description field for the VIs, not writing a seperate help file.

This is something that is part of NI's recommended guidelines and is also common sense, since both commenting and filling the description field save A LOT of time. I know that whenever I get lazy or don't have time to comment my code, I usually kick myself later when I have to revisit it.

You could say that this is old stuff, but I'm fairly sure I also remember seeing many VIs included with later versions of LV which are also like that. In fact, I don't remember that many vi.lib VIs which do have proper comments and descriptions.