OT Using Excel at the same time as using ActiveX interface to same?

[unclebump]

Could you use the excel viewer or office web components instead of having excel installed on the machine?? Is there a way to restrict the office installation to only allow certain users to see it??

[Ben]

" ... instead of having excel installed on the machine?? "

How would I update the sheets without Excel on my machine?

Ben

[Jarrod_S.]

Is there any change in behavior if you set Open New Instance to true? I'm also a little confused that the user is somehow managing to open your instance of Excel. I would have thought they'd open their own instance by default.

Other than that I can only recommend modifying your AE to have a case (Is Excel Open) it always executes before moving on to the desired case. If that case is false, it could close references, divert briefly to Init, and then go to the desired case. So your AE would basically become a small state machine that hopefully only executes one case most of the time.

One more option: Don't continuously dump your data into Excel. Use a temporary file format for the data, like CSV. Then build your clients a quick app that converts this temp file into their fancy Excel spreadsheet whenever they want to view the current data.

[Wayne.C]

Ben,

Have you tried a cut down version that only opens 1 workbook with 1 worksheet?  Starting to wonder if your problem is related to the # of workbooks/worksheets?

[Ben]

The user is just opening Excel!

Regarding turning my Action Engine into a state machine.

I would probably implement a sub-VI rather than twist the action engine back on itself because a constant wired to the condition terminal is a specail case that LV understands.

Ben

[Wayne.C]

Ben,

I have been able to recreate this using the Write Table to XL example on LV8.2.  Modify the block diagram so that Excel does not come up visible, and then run the VI with the completion task set to Leave Excel Open.  You now have an open invisible Excel workbook.  Change the block diagram so that Excel comes up visable and run again.  It opens the invisible workbook and the new workbook under the same instance of Excel.  Best of all, it was all accomplished using NI supplied code.

If you made your instance of Excel visible, could you then set some parameters for that particular instance to keep the operators from closing/modifying your data?

[tst]

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@centerbolt wrote:

If you made your instance of Excel visible, could you then set some parameters for that particular instance to keep the operators from closing/modifying your data?

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I'm guessing the Readonly property I mentioned earlier, but I can't check.

[Ben]

Thanks to all who have offered ideas.

Shane and centerbolts ideas appear worth testing.

I'll try to talk to the custemer today (maybe).

Thanks!

Ben

[Ben · Accepted solution]

"Their and Back Again" (Jules Verne (sp?)

I set "interactive = F" when I opened Excel and this stoped the operators from breaking my application.

They can still open and do a "Save As..." but my stuff is surviving.

Thanks for the ideas!

Ben

Message Edited by Ben on 06-26-2007 11:25 AM

[thols]

Had same problems. The user must be able to view the excel-file, but not modify or screw anything up. Interactive=False doesn't work either. The user can open another file and close Excel and screw things up. What I did which solved everything was that I open a second reference to Excel directly after I open "my" Excel reference (open new instance=true for both). This will make "my" reference exclusive to me and when the user opens the excel-file it will be opened in the second instance and be read-only for the user.