DDE and OpenOffice Calc

Hi All! We have been using Excel and DDE to communicate with our PLC's trhough RSLinx for a while now. Recently out IT department switched us to OpenOffice and I'm trying to figure out how to do the DDE stuff in their Calc (spredsheets) program. Has anyone here done this?

I can get the DDE channel open and read anything from the PLC, but writting is a different story. I can sometimes write one integer to an N7, but not 2. I think the problem is that Calc uses Unicode strings and RSLinx expects ASCII strings.

Any suggestions?

Tell them now that they saved so much money getting rid of Excel they can get you a good HMI program
if it doesn't need to run full time there are some HMI's with Demos that run for 2 hours at a time.

I'm guessing they didn't ask you if about the change first.

Seriously though, The problem you are having is writing 2 numbers to 2 consecutive N7 locations?

Brian, I played around with openoffice calc using DSData and was having alot of problems with it. I could read values at times and at other times it just seemed to lockup. May have been my fault however. I gave up after a couple of hours playing with it. I don't like openoffice anyway.....

Dale

I did a DDE read test with RSLinx and OpenOffice Calc just the other day. I didn't like how Calc "flickered" every time it did a DDE update, as that made the whole application hard to look at. In my particular case, closing OpenOffice Calc also hard-crashed RSLinx Classic, so it never made it past the toy stage.

How do you define a DDE poke in OpenOffice Calc ?

Ken,

As a fan of OOo, I found this
http://www.oooforum.org/forum/viewtopic.phtml?t=39364&highlight=poke

I have no idea if it works!