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LabVIEW Technical Resource – tools and techniques

Bridging the Gap Between LabVIEW and Excel

Using the XL-VIEW Toolkit
by Eric Mallett

How often has your customer or
manager requested presentation quality
graphs and data tables from your
LabVIEW applications? LabVIEW,
though brilliant in other ways, has
limited capabilities for generating
formatted output, making it difficult to
create data presentations which meet a
customer or manager’s expectations.
For comparison, let’s examine a simple
quality checking and reporting data
acquisition program. The block diagram
shown in Figure 1 outputs a plain page
of numbers or a text file that is really
quite basic . Your customer now has the
data, but not in a very useful format,
unless you first import the file into Excel
and then format it. Reformatting an
your customer’s satisfaction. By
replacing the Write to Spreadsheet VIs
with a few simple Excel communication
VIs, your data will look more
professional (see Figure 3b).
Often, the data is not simply composed
of numeric data. How frequently do you
need a column representing time

Figure 1: Writing ASCII data files

Up until now, a typical method for
generating formatted output was to save
simple tab-delimited ASCII text files,
and later import those files into Excel to
manually create formatted data tables
and graphs. There is a new toolkit avail-
able which will cut out this extra step and
have your LabVIEW programs talk
directly to Excel using ActiveX. The new
toolkit, XL-VIEW, allows you to bridge
the gap between LabVIEW and Excel,
giving you the best of both worlds.
This modular package of VIs allows
your programs to create formatted data
tables and graphs ready for use by your
manager or customer. XL-VIEW lets
you easily take advantage of the data
formatting power of Excel from
within LabVIEW.
imported text file in Excel can be time occurrences? The data formatting VI
consuming, especially since Excel tends reformats the first column to reflect the
to break up header information. time of day. You will also want to format
the rest of the data table. Additionally,
Writing Formatted Excel Files the formatting VIs give you access to
from LabVIEW Excel’s “format>>cells” pull-down menu
The block diagram shown in Figure 2 of data type formatting options. The
illustrates how to output formatted data Name Sheet.vi assigns meaningful names
more efficiently by eliminating the text to each work or chart sheet.
file writing VIs and sending
your data directly to Excel.
The new toolkit of VIs called
XL-VIEW makes it easy to
automate this process.
Adding borders, bold or italic
fonts, or even some color and
data alignment will make
the table easier to read.
Yes, the program has grown
(see Figure 3a), but so has Figure 2: Writing Excel files using XL-VIEW

LabVIEW Technical Resource • Volume 7, Number 2 • www.ltrpub.com

 ™
LabVIEW Technical Resource – tools and techniques

Figure 3a: Using XL-VIEW to format an Excel data Table

Creating Excel Graphs Additionally, you can format the legend,

from LabVIEW
Graphs enhance the look of a data
presentation, making it easier to compre-
hend. We’ve seen great improvements in
LabVIEW’s printing abilities with the
release of 5.1; however, Excel is currently
more powerful in this area. The
XL-VIEW VIs allow you to take full
plot area, graph title and much more
(see Figure 4a and 4b).
Printing Excel Output Figure 3b: XL-VIEW format results
from LabVIEW
Now that your data is presentable and
stored in a form specifically created for can apply descriptive headers and footers,
data manipulation, you still need to page numbers, the date, and can also

Figure 4a: Using XL-VIEW to format graph axes, legend, title

and other advanced Excel Graph Wizard features Voltage Drop

advantage of Excel’s graphing capabilities
from within your LabVIEW programs. If
you only need to build a simple graph,
use XL-VIEW’s Easy Graph.vi. However,
if you want direct control over the Excel
Graph Wizard steps, you have that flexi-
bility, too. Having full access to the
Graph Wizard allows you to label axes,
apply gridlines and modify scaling.
create a hard copy of the table and graph.
There is no need to open Excel, the
Print.vi in XL-VIEW will print the graph
and data for you directly from within
your LabVIEW program.
Before your program directs Excel to
print, you’ll want to format the output
pages. Using XL-VIEW, your application Figure 4b: XL-VIEW graph results

www.ltrpub.com • Volume 7, Number 2 • LabVIEW Technical Resource

 ™
LabVIEW Technical Resource – tools and techniques

Using Excel Formulas in

Figure 5: Controlling Excel’s page setup and printing
scale your print-out and adjust the
margins as shown in Figure 5. If it is part
of Excel’s Page Setup process, then you
now have control over it from LabVIEW.
LabVIEW Output Files
Have you ever needed to make
calculations on a table similar to the pre-
vious example shown in Figure 3b on
page 15? What if your customer wants
to know the average voltage measured
per quarter-hour during the shift? How
would you determine this? If you are
using a text file, you have two options.
The first option is to sum and store the
numbers of each measurement
determined throughout the shift, then
average and write the results at the end of

Figure 6: Writing three averaging equations and three IF statements

the shift. The second option is to write

the voltage measurements to file during
Voltage Drop each interval; and at the end of the shift,
read the entire data table; calculate
average values, and write the results.
Both are workable solutions if the data
sets are small.

However, a better solution is to store

your data in Excel and take advantage
of its calculation abilities. Figure 6
demonstrates how to solve this problem
using XL-VIEW. Write the observed
voltages using the XL-VIEW VIs, as
shown previously, then use XL-VIEW’s
equation building VIs to construct the
averaging formula and write to
whichever cell you wish. The formula
can even be written to another
worksheet. If you also need to know if
the average was greater than normal, use
the Logic, Comparison and IF Statement
Figure 7: Example results using the XL-VIEW toolkit VIs to construct an Excel formula and

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 ™
LabVIEW Technical Resource – tools and techniques
include the answer as part of the data
table. A pie chart of the averages would
clearly indicate which voltage is highest.
You can create a pie chart with the graph
VIs just as you did with the data table.
Compare the report you were able to
create programmatically with the
XL-VIEW toolkit (see Figure 7) and
the text file you produced without it
(see Figure 1) to see the ease of using
XL-VIEW to automate the task.
Constructing Excel Equations in
LabVIEW Output Files
XL-VIEW’s Logic, Comparison, and
Mathematics VIs provide the flexibility
to construct any formula that can be cre-
ated when working in Excel. Only one
VI is required to send your equations
from LabVIEW to the cell or group of
cells you choose. For example, let’s
construct the equation
The block diagram shown in Figure 8
does this quite easily. Notice how the B4
term is added. The cell is specified by the
Figure 8: Building a formula in A1 Format
row and column numbers, not by the
string “B4”. Using row-column format
allows you to write the same equation to
multiple cells and to increment the cells
within the equation. This concept was
illustrated previously in Figure 6. All
equation building VIs have inputs for
both the A1 and row-column formats.
Using Excel Calculations
to Access and Maintain
LabVIEW Data
Many applications require maintenance
of a large data set, however, what is really
of interest are calculations made from a
portion of the data set and how changes
to one or more specific values alter the
results of these calculations. Using text
files to perform these tasks in LabVIEW
is very difficult. You cannot easily read or
write a specific value from an ASCII file,
nor can you read, for example, the
middle 200 observations from the
fifteenth column of data without signifi-
cant effort. If the data were saved in
Excel, then your LabVIEW program can
easily access the data using XL-VIEW.
Simply open the existing data set, specify
the sheet and range of cells you are inter-
ested in, and you have direct access to the
information stored in these locations.
The power of this capability becomes
even more evident when you need to
determine the effects of changing
SQUARE ROOT
information within these cells. If you
have been able to change individual
values in a text file from LabVIEW, recal-
culating values of interest still requires
you to read the entire data set. However,
www.ltrpub.com • Volume 7, Number 2 • LabVIEW Technical Resource
if you had been maintaining this data set
within Excel and written the equations to
perform the calculations, you need only
read a single cell of data after making the
needed changes. Consider the example of
a 100 row by 100 column data set. You
want to change the value in row 51 and
column 10, and then recalculate the
overall mean. With a text data file, you
would read the entire data set, use the
array functions to replace the value of
interest, calculate the overall mean, and
rewrite the entire data file. With an Excel
data file, you write the new value to cell
J51 (row 51, column 10) and read the
overall mean from cell CV101 (row 101,
column 100). This is possible because
when you created the data set, you wrote
the equation “sum(A1:CV100)” to cell
CV101. Even if the equation had not
been setup previously, you could still add
the equation at any time to the data set
using the XL-VIEW VIs.
About XL-VIEW
The XL-VIEW toolkit generates format-
ted LabVIEW output by having your
LabVIEW programs talk directly to
Excel using ActiveX. Because the
XL-VIEW VIs use the ActiveX
technology, the toolkit is only available
for Windows NT/98/95 users.
Not only does this toolkit expand
LabVIEW’s data output formatting
abilities. Additionally, this toolkit makes
LabVIEW much more attractive to
Measure users considering an upgrade to
LabVIEW, since any templates they have
created can now be accessed with ease.
A demo of the XL-VIEW toolkit for
Windows NT/98/95 users is included on
this issue’s LTR resource disk.
About the author:
Eric Mallett is President of E&L Software Solutions, the
developers of the XL-VIEW toolkit. XL-VIEW can be
obtained from E & L Software Solutions either online
at members.aol.com/ELSSsales or by telephone at
480-807-3873 (country code 01).
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