WinCC Sattion Upgrade

I've been tasked with replaced our old WinCC stations with newer ones.

The old stations are a Siemens Rack PC based on Windows 2000 professional and running WinCC v6.0

It also uses Excel (Office 2001 prof) with some macro's in order to make changes to various parts of the projects like adding alarms, etc. So there is quite a big excel project with various data relevant to the WinCC project. And also the language is fixed to German!

The new PC's have been bought. They are Lenovo PC's with Windows 7 professional.

Installing WinCC shouldn't be an issue, but what is involved in upgrading the old WinCC project?

Also, and this is the main question, has anyone ever been involved in using excel and macros for a WinCC project? I'm not finding much help out there on the big world of google!

Cheers!

If the excel macros are using the WinCC API directly, it might have changed, but hopefully not. If the excel stuff is just generating files that are imported, I think you'll be ok

There's a Siemens FAQ which describes how to migrate WinCC projects to newer versions:

https://support.industry.siemens.com/cs/ww/en/view/44029132

It's possible that the Excel file is the "WinCC configuration tool", which is delivered on the WinCC installation CD/DVD. There is a compatibility list for this tool, which Excel version you'll need to use this. As far as I know, it connects directly to WinCC whithout using export/import files.

From further understanding, the excel Macro's for tags and alarm editing, etc, it is just creating a file which WinCC then reads and imports.

But when a new job is entered into the machine, it runs some calculations with excel so I think it does directly connect with WinCC.

I got some further info forwarded to me from the previous person who looked into this.

It states "Siemens have supplied the OPC (Open Platform Communication) interface to replace the DDE (Dynamic Data Exchange) channel setting for the presetting calculator"

I have also located a folder called PresettingCalculationOverOPC with some files in and an excel sheet with same name as the project excel file. What I'm supposed to do with this I'm not fully sure as there are no instructions. I'll google this for more info in a bit.

The info states "the approach would be to integrate this into the currect version of the project and test"

Then we can migrate to WinCC 6.0 to 7.0 and then 7.0 to 7.3.

I've also found all the updates packages and licences for this which is a big help as I didn't think we had them yet!

Getting somewhere.

The Siemens Support Page for project migration:
https://support.industry.siemens.co...ersions-of-wincc-from-v4-to-v7?dti=0&lc=en-WW

states:
With WinCC V7.0 SP2 and higher the "Windows DDE" channel is no longer included in the delivery. Use the "OPC" channel instead. Remove the "Windows DDE" channel before migration.

And I also found a page that shows how to create a DDE connection - so I understand how our current connection was created.
https://support.industry.siemens.com/tf/ww/en/posts/wincc-and-dde/1512/?page=0&pageSize=10

So, I now need to create an OPC connection and move all the tags from the DDE connection to the OPC connection.... correct? Sounds too simple to me! haha.

OK... how to create the OPC connection?

OK.... seem to be getting nowhere with this....

First step... creating OPC connection in WinCC v6.0???