You do know what LabVIEW means, don't you? Laboratory Virtual Instrument Engineering Workbench. It is not a "general-purpose Programming Language", which means that some "general purpose programs" (like creating pretty billing statements) are not its Primary Task.
However, with a little work and ingenuity, you can "fake it". Here are several possibilities:
- Write a Report. If you have the Report Generation Toolkit available, you can easily create an HTML or Excel Report (you can also create a Word Report, but that seems to be a bit more difficult).
- Be more creative with LabVIEW's String Controls and Functions, taking into account some of their limitations. If you want nice columns, consider a "Left" and "Right" part of the output, where "Left" is the Description String ("Available Balance") and Right is the Value (numeric, usually, but you could make it strings). I strongly urge you to learn to use "Format Into String" for all of your Value strings and not the simpler conversion functions. To keep Values aligned, make sure you right-justify everything, and print with an appropriate number of digits after the decimal point.
- You can simplify things by having only two output strings -- a multi-line Description String, and a multi-line Value String. Now you only have two String Controls to worry about spacing so that everything is visible (make them wide enough), everything aligns (align the two controls), and nothing overlaps (space them appropriately so they don't overlap).
See if this helps.
Bob Schor
