MS Office (Excel) Toolkit - trouble formatting cells

Question

I have the MS Office toolkit 1.1 and LabVIEW 7.0. I am using 'Excel easy table' to write arrays of strings (number strings and titles, etc.) to a spreadsheet but I also want to control the number of decimal places and the number format.
I want to use 'Custom ##0.0E+0' number format (engineering notation) and I want to have 3 or 4 decimal places. Currently, the format of the number written into Excel changes based on whether I converted from a number to an engineering string (engineering notation is not preserved in Excel) or if the string in the array is read straight from my GPIB query. I want to be able to control these things within LabVIEW. Any suggestions are appreciated.
Sara

Answer 1

Hi Sara,
The easiest thing to do would be for you to create your new report based off a template Excel file. I have attached a sample VI and a sample Excel template that show how to do this. If you know which way you want individual columns to be formatted, this is the easiest solution. If, however, you might have different formatting that needs to be assigned dynamically, you will have to use the more advanced Excel VIs, like the "Excel Set Cell Format.vi", located in the Excel Format subpalette. There is an example that ships with the Report Generation Toolkit that uses this VI to set the colors of certain cells in the spreadsheet...the example is located at examples\office\Excel Examples.llb\Conditionally Formatted Spreadshee
t.vi.
I hope these suggestions help. Good luck,
-D
Darren Nattinger, CLA
LabVIEW Artisan and Nugget Penman
Attachments:
formatted_template.xlt ‏14 KB
Report_With_Template.vi ‏34 KB