Excel Import / Export + Direct Link

[Tom Klaber]

We need cleaner ways to get information into and out of VW.  We need a better Excel Exporter + Importer.  It would also be amazing to have a direct linkable external excel sheet where when information changes in a VW worksheet - the external Excel document gets the new info pushed to it so it can be easily shareable as a stand-alone resource. 

[Art V]

Yes it would be nice to have this. At times I need to get the worksheet information in an Excel file to distribute to others and copy/page static info does work, but it is a bit of a one way solution.

 

Once you start into design optimization the numbers may change quite frequently and that is where a live link would be quite useful, even better if it could be bi-directional for those cases where it would be handy.

The latter might require beefing up the available functions in VW Worksheets to make them a bit more compatible with Excel so that consultant data can be more easily used as input for data driven objects.

[R_Teunissen]

I agree with the need for a better Excel import/ export of data.

 

Tried to get it running through a database connection, but no luck.

 

The Spotlight version of VW has an option of exporting the Instrument Data to a Tab-delimited file, what you can open in Excel, alter the data and import that back into the VW file. (see image)

After a "Refresh Instruments" the data ends up in the record and next to the Symbols.

 

This means that the capability is already available, but only with very specific data.

[Miguel Barrera]

You can link an excel file as a database to a VW file with ODBC. You will need to setup the excel file with an ODBC driver, which is a formatting protocol that reads the header row as record fields and subsequent rows as data records. I am not sure about Macs but Windows already comes with MS drivers like excel, access, etc.

[R_Teunissen]

Thanks Miguel for the quick reply.

 

Did do some Googling and found, that Excel for Mac does have ODBC drivers installed.

 

Was able to open up the window in Excel (see below), but was not able to get it to work. (My apologies for my Database ignorance)

 

I know that it is asking a lot of your time, but any chance, that you could point me to a tutorial, or talk me through this?