Reading In Values from Microsoft Excel

[Ryan Joseph]

I am currently working on a senior design project in which I need to access pulse oximetry readings from a Nonin Xpod pulse oximeter.  This device use to have a LabVIEW driver but the company that made the driver, CARDIAC, no longer does.  As a solution to this, I am trying to read in these values to LabVIEW from Microsoft Excel.  The pulse oximeter has an option to write the values directly to an Excel spreadsheet.  The pulse oximeter takes a reading every second and lists the pulse rate and oxygen saturation in two different columns in Excel.  Every second, it writes the new values in the cell below the last reading.  I wanted to know if it was possible to access these measurements from Excel through LabVIEW while the pulse oximeter continues to take new values.  I need to obtain a reading approximately every thirty seconds.  Is this possible?  If not, do I have any other options than attempting to read the values directly from the serial port into LabVIEW.  The pulse oximeter has three data streams each 1 byte.  The first data stream is the status of the pulse oximeter, the second is the pulse rate, and the third is the oxygen saturation.

[smercurio_fc]

You certainly can read the information from an Excel file either via ActiveX or via ADO. There's a "Write Table to XL" example that ships with LabVIEW that shows the ActiveX way. Basically all you would need is to replace the "Set Cell Value" VI with a "Get Cell Value", which is pretty trivial. The main issue with this method isn't being able to read the Excel file, but rather running into the problem of two applications trying to access the same file at the same time. You will likely run into a file I/O error. Does the oximeter application keep the Excel file open?

I would say that reading the information over the serial port is your best bet since you don't have to deal with ActiveX or ADO, and you're simply using VISA to read information over the serial port. If all you need to do is read three bytes this is trivial. Check out the examples that ship with LabVIEW on reading/writing with the serial port.