writing to excel using the toolkit

[lec]

I am having trouble writing to a specific cell in an excel spreadsheet from labview. I have labview 8, office 2000 and I went and bought the microsoft toolkit that was recommended. I've tried 'easy table' and ' easy text' but cannot find a simple "write data from this labview vi to this cell in excel" vi. there has to be a way to write data to a single cell. also, i cannot find an acceptable control or constant that 'easy table' will accept on the 'report in' input node. i've tried property nodes, constants, controls, paths... nothing links.Help!

[Darren]

You must create a new report with the "New Report.vi" on the Report Generation palette.  This will give you a reference to your report, which you can wire to subsequent Report Generation VIs.  If you want to write a cell, or a table's worth of cells, to a given location, you can use the Excel Easy Text.vi or the Excel Easy Table.vi and simply specify the indices (row, column) of the cell where you want to insert the text or the table.  You can check out [LabVIEW]\examples\office\Excel Examples.llb\Sample Report (Excel).vi to see Excel Easy Text.vi, Excel Easy Table.vi, and Excel Easy Graph.vi all being used to insert text, tables, and graphs into specific locations in an Excel worksheet.

Let me know if you have any other questions...to learn about other cool features of the toolkit, I suggest you take a look at other VIs in the examples folder.

Good luck,
-D

[lec]

Darren, you're the MAN! It took me < 5 minutes after I got your reply to get it working... after spending a day and a half monkeying around with it. (Another great documentation job by NI! What they lack in documentation they make up for with this Forum!) I'll take your advice and check out the examples also. Thanks again!

[Darren]

I'm glad I was able to help.  I'm actually the developer in charge of the Report Generation Toolkit, so if you have any functional issues as you're using it, please let me know.  And if you have any specific suggestions on improving the documentation, you can send them my way.

-D

[lec]

Darren,

Yeah, just cut your reply to me and paste it in the 'Detailed Help' section under the 'Report In' flag. That would do it! I could not find any documentation that said this 'Report In' node needed a 'New Report' input. Its funny, many Labview vi's have good documentation but every once in a while I find one that leaves out an important clue. Here's an idea for you... You should bring up a message to your QA management that every message on the Forum should have a designated person responsible to fix the documentation or software (on the next revision) with the goal of reducing the number of posts each day/week/month, etc..(this is a 'measurable'. Management LOVES 'measurables'!). Labview is a nice piece of software but the fact that there are so many posts demonstrates that it has alot of holes either in the documentation or the performance. Just an idea for you.

Thanks again for the help.

Larry