So just to be clear, the executable and the data it is accessing are on the same computer right? The only thing you need to be concerned about is generating a path to the data that works in either development or executable form. The problem that many people run into is that they try to locate the file relative to the VI's location - which logically changes in an executable.
The other thing to avoid is hard coding the path in the code - a far better approach if you have a path that can't be referenced to any known location on disk is to save that path in the application's ini file. Whether an executable or a development system, this file is always there and always in the same place logically. LV ships with VIs for reading and writing ini file keys in a structured way.
Mike...
