Reading from an excel spreadsheet, then having user interact with the data

[Paul Liu]

Hi All,

I am a new user to LabView and this is my first project using it. The project requires me to read a massive spreadsheet from Excel into LabView and then allowing the user to do the following:

- Select which columns to plot against the first column

- Use a cursor to select a portion of the spreadsheet: the Vi will then average the selected data by column (in other words, if the user selects data across multiple columns, the program will average data in each column separately). Then write the averages to the csv file.

So far, I have the spreadsheet read into a table as strings (because the first row of the spreadsheet is words). I have spent a lot of time searching how to allow the user to select data on the table to perform operations on, but to no avail. I am hoping you guys could give me some insight on how to tackle this project.

[jcarmody]

Why must you use LabVIEW?  This sounds like a job for Excel's VBA.

[Paul Liu]

This assignment will give me experience in using LabView.

[jcarmody]

So you don't need LabVIEW for this particular problem; that's good.  You can probably do this with LabVIEW, but it's not the best tool for the job; LabVIEW is really good for applications that interface with hardware.  Can you pick a different project to familiarize yourself with it?  Something with DAQ or instrument control?

[patufet_99]

Some years ago it was possible from LabVIEW to interact with EXCEL with the DDE functions.

I do not know if this still works in recent versions of LabVIEW.

[Gribo]

DDE has been deprecated for more than a decade. You can use the .NET API for Excel, but it will get very complicated, as you will probably have to register user events and callbacks.

 

[Jordan Kuehn]

If you have the report generation toolkit you can open a new report with the existing file as a template. Then you can call [Excel Get Data.vi] to extract the data from the worksheet.