LabVIEW
reading excel file
A "spreadsheet file" is not an Excel file. The "write to spreadsheet file.vi" creates a tab separated ASCII formatted table by default.
Your application does not write an Excel file, just a spreadsheet file with an *.xls extension. This extension fools windows explorer to open it in Excel and Excel is smart enough to detect that it is not an Excel file and opens it still in a reasonable way. See my comment in the Earlier post.
True Excel files have a proprietary format devised by Microsoft. If you want to read and write to genuine Excel files, you need the Office toolkit or use the technique outlined by M
ichael Munroe in the above mentioned thread.
Your application does not write an Excel file, just a spreadsheet file with an *.xls extension. This extension fools windows explorer to open it in Excel and Excel is smart enough to detect that it is not an Excel file and opens it still in a reasonable way. See my comment in the Earlier post.
True Excel files have a proprietary format devised by Microsoft. If you want to read and write to genuine Excel files, you need the Office toolkit or use the technique outlined by M
ichael Munroe in the above mentioned thread.
In any case, read/write to/from spreadsheet file does not work with native excel files. How to tell the difference? An empty excel file is already ~14kb in size, so if your files are smaller they are most likely not excel files.
Open some of your files using notepad. A real excel file will have lots of strange characters and you should not easily see the actual table data. A fake excel file will nicely show the table data, even in notepad.
I think writing your data directly into a proprietary microsoft format is overrated unless you need some of the fancy formatting (Different fonts, sizes, merged cells, etc.). Excel can import vitually any reasonable spreadsheet-like text written by LabVIEW. I sometimes write spreadsheet data as comma-
delimited ASCII table and name the file "*.csv". csv files also open in excel and there is no confusion about the format.
Open some of your files using notepad. A real excel file will have lots of strange characters and you should not easily see the actual table data. A fake excel file will nicely show the table data, even in notepad.
I think writing your data directly into a proprietary microsoft format is overrated unless you need some of the fancy formatting (Different fonts, sizes, merged cells, etc.). Excel can import vitually any reasonable spreadsheet-like text written by LabVIEW. I sometimes write spreadsheet data as comma-
delimited ASCII table and name the file "*.csv". csv files also open in excel and there is no confusion about the format.
