has anyone worked with the new Excel fuctions in VW2021?

[Jayme McColgan]

started playing around with VW2021 (were currently on 2020 at work) and the new excel functions. i cant get it to work. the vs.EXL_NewBook() function claims it worked (by returning a True value) but nothing is actually created... 

 

I'm trying to automate the kinda labor intensive process of creating a lighting patch sheet and step 1 is it creating an excel sheet that i can format... 

[JBenghiat]

Check your path. File paths are usually relative to the script location, unless you use absolute paths (i.e. c://… or \Users\…)

 

Possibly the file won’t actually appear on disk until you call EXL_SaveAndCloseBook()

[twk]

I have been using the python external libraries openpyxl and pandas dataframes for data exchange between vectorworks and excel. They have very good documentation.

 

https://openpyxl.readthedocs.io/en/stable/
https://pandas.pydata.org/pandas-docs/stable/reference/api/pandas.DataFrame.html

 

[Ivaylo Stanchev]

Hi,

Because of the two Excel file formats - XLSX and XLS, there are two different programing codes for each of the formats. To know which one to execute we need to know the extension or the whole name of the file. Assuming that anyway, the user will know the full name ( hardcoded or taken from file chooser) we decided to use EXL_NewBook(filePath) instead of EXL_NewBook(fileExtension).

 

EXL_NewBook(filePath) returns TRUE because the initial XLS or XLSX code was successfully executed. But the real file is created only after calling EXL_SaveAndCloseBook(filePath).

 

Technically, an empty string could be used in EXL_NewBook(''). In this case, the "XLSX" code will be executed by default. But if at the end, the book is saved and closed as "*.XLS", the file extension will differ from the file format. And an error will appear when opening this file using the Excel application.

 

Here is a short script example. I hope you find it useful.

 

PROCEDURE TestExcel;
VAR
	newname	: STRING;
	res : BOOLEAN;
	shNum : INTEGER;

BEGIN
	newname:= 'C:\\Temp\\Test.xlsx';
	res := EXL_NEWBOOK('');
	res := EXL_ADDSHEET('NEW_SHEET');
	res := EXL_GETSHEETINDEX('NEW_SHEET',shNum);
IF ( res = TRUE) THEN
BEGIN
	res := EXL_SETCELLSTRING(shNum,0,0,newname);
END; 
	res := EXL_SAVEANDCLOSEBOOK(newname);
	
END;
Run(TestExcel);

 

Best regards,

Ivaylo.

[Jayme McColgan]

11 hours ago, twk said:

I have been using the python external libraries openpyxl and pandas dataframes for data exchange between vectorworks and excel. They have very good documentation.

 

https://openpyxl.readthedocs.io/en/stable/
https://pandas.pydata.org/pandas-docs/stable/reference/api/pandas.DataFrame.html

 

yeah i ended up just using the xlsxwriter module and it works great. 

[Jayme McColgan]

15 hours ago, JBenghiat said:

Check your path. File paths are usually relative to the script location, unless you use absolute paths (i.e. c://… or \Users\…)

 

Possibly the file won’t actually appear on disk until you call EXL_SaveAndCloseBook()

the file path was correct and i tried with both vs.EXL_SaveAndCloseBook() and vs.EXL_CloseBook() with no success. i ended up using an external python module to achieve what i wanted since it works with VW2020 as well.