Writing data to an XLS file without Microsoft Excel installed. Tutorial.

Task:

I have a piece of equipment that transmits serial data to a terminal program. Can the data be sent directly to Excel?

Requirements:

• Advanced Serial Data Logger Professional, Enterprise, or trial version;
• Local database

It is assumed that:

You've prepared parser items for export.

For this tutorial all items were prepared in the previous part.

Also you may read other examples:

• RS232 to Excel. Four methods to send data from RS232 to Excel
• Writing data to a CSV text file
• Sending data to Excel through the DDE interface

Solution:

All parser items are now ready for export to an Excel spreadsheet. Please, open the configuration window of the "Local database" plug-in (fig.1 and 2).

Fig.1. Local Database plugin.

Fig.2. Excel export. Selecting a database.

Just select a database type at the field #1, input a path, where new files will be being created in the field #2 and specify a file name prefix in the field #3.

It's all other options are optional. On the second page "Data formats" you can specify a representation of your data. Because all our variables have the "string" data type, therefore it is unnecessary in our case to change format settings. On the next page "Columns order" you can specify, how variables will be exported to a spreadsheet. If you will not specify a columns order, then the program will write all variables in the following order: internal variables (FULL_DATA_PACKET, DATA_PACKET and DATE_TIME_STAMP), parser variables, in the order, as you've specified in the parser configuration.