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Office 365/Excel and ActiveX


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Has anyone ported any code using ActiveX from Excel 2016 to 365 , is it seamless ? somehow i figure it isnt... to be honest I know nothign about 365.

I have several apps that rely heavily on Excel 2016 , I cant use the report generation stuff since some of the machines do not have LabVIEW (2019) Pro only base or full.

unfortunatly I cant rely on IT to warn me when they are going to switch ... 

TIA

Dan

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It usually works, unless it doesn't. And that has in my case always been associated with the click to run installer that IT seems to use. For some reason this installer does not properly register the still present ActiveX libraries for Office in the Windows system. Which results in the situation that LabVIEW complains that it can't find the ActiveX classes anymore. Going into Control Panel->Applications and Programs (or something to that extend, the name keeps changing between Windows versions) and doing a Repair Install of Office 365 so far has made this work for me. But I'm not using the Microsoft Office tools to often from LabVIEW, so this feedback is at best incidential.

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Office 365 gave me many headaches in the past. Additionally updates would change the ActiveX interfaces breaking compatibility unless you reloaded and recompiled. I would typically try to purchase a single seat permanent license for a particular test stand and not use the IT software. Not sure if that is an option for you.

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14 minutes ago, ooth said:

If the ActiveX property nodes are blank (show "No Properties" when selected) then it is probably related to what Rolf described when Office was installed. This is a work around

https://knowledge.ni.com/KnowledgeArticleDetails?id=kA00Z0000019KZNSA2&l=en-US

Actually the underlaying DCOM technology that is the basis for ActiveX is perfectly able to invoke an Automation Server out of process if it detects that it can’t be run in the current process, such as when the bitness between caller and server doesn’t match. The ActiveX Server needs to be registered accordingly for both environments properly and this is what the Repair install seems to do. However it may not be always true for every Office365 installation and Microsoft definitely is trying to get away from ActiveX and is deliberately marginalizing support for it more and more.

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1 hour ago, Jordan Kuehn said:

Office 365 gave me many headaches in the past. Additionally updates would change the ActiveX interfaces breaking compatibility unless you reloaded and recompiled. I would typically try to purchase a single seat permanent license for a particular test stand and not use the IT software. Not sure if that is an option for you.

Unfortunately that is true. LabVIEW wants to link to object methods by MethodID  (a 32-bit number that has to be changed when the method signature changes). If LabVIEW would instead use the MethodName (which it also stores in the Method Node, it could adapt to changes in methods as long as those changes only affect optional parameters). With access to the LabVIEW source code this would have been a change of a few hours, but with ActiveX being anyhow legacy now, even that effort is of course to much to spend.

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4 hours ago, Jordan Kuehn said:

Office 365 gave me many headaches in the past. Additionally updates would change the ActiveX interfaces breaking compatibility unless you reloaded and recompiled. I would typically try to purchase a single seat permanent license for a particular test stand and not use the IT software. Not sure if that is an option for you.

Jordan

I actually started down this path today wth a production test setup , it will likely be the easiest most painless option

18 hours ago, Gribo said:

LibreOffice? 

ActiveX (And the .NET API) should work with Office365.

Gribo 

I briefly looked into this , but , and it would be a bunch of extra work , which is fine , until our company finds out it is installed , then they may have serious issues ....

I was also thinking today we have test setups around the world , most do not have Excel , but a few do , so asking them to move to another spreadsheet platoform may casue even more headaches especially since a few are military ...

OOTH who is in this thread knows what I am referring to regarding corporate policies and trying to do non-standard thinkgs ... I already push their policies to the limit in a few cases...

So i think I will explore the single seat license , we did it once for another project , so hopefully it wont be an issue again ...

Thanks for the input everyone...

Dan

 

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