Report Generation MS Word Table Bug

Question

Hi everybody,
I am using Word 2010 and LV2010 and I am unable create a proper table with Word using the Report Generation Toolkit. Excel and HTML work fine, but Word fails. Not even the Examples work as they are supposed to.
When using the attached VI (see screenshot below)
the result appears as follows:
Temperature
Temperature
Temperature
Temperature
Temperature
Data 1
Data 1
Data 1
Data 1
Data 1
Data 2
Data 2
Data 2
Data 2
Data 2
Does anyone have an idea?
Thanks in advance.
ben
Solved!
Go to Solution.
Attachments:
test_table.vi ‏10 KB

Answer 1

OK, if NI won't provide a workaround, I'll create my own:
The problem stems from the fact that the NI Report Toolkit populate a Word table by first creating an empty table of the correct size, then placing the table contents into the copy buffer, then selects the whole table and uses Paste to push the data into the table. The problem is actually in Word, because in Word 2010 it interprets the contents of the copy buffer differently.
The solution is to alter the data that gets pushed into the copy buffer by the NI Report Toolkit. To implement my fix, you will need to alter one VI of the NI Report Toolkit (so you might want to make a backup in case this stops it from working in other previous release of Word).
Open [LabVIEW installation folder]\vi.lib\addons\_office\_wordsub.llb\Word_In​sert_Table.vi
There is a nested for loop that interprets the provided string array data and reformats it into a long ASCII string for the copy buffer. It should look like this:
Change the nested loop to look like this:
The changes I've made are twofold:
1. Within the inner loop, replace the "\n" char with a Tab character
2. Just after the inner loop, add a new "concatenate strings" function that adds "\n".
This alters the string that the toolkit places into the copy buffer. You should find that report tables now populate correctly in Word 2010!
This is untested on previous releases of Word, and could possible introduce problems there, so if anyone could test this for me it would be most appreciated
Best of luck!
Thoric (CLA, CLED, CTD and LabVIEW Champion)