Absolute Newbee requires help

Good Morning All,

I am a chemical engineer that has recently been tasked with creating live trends for a plant that I have just been moved to. The plant is using wonder ware scada and you can view a few live trends at a time.

I would like to create an excel spreadsheet that in which the live data continuously is drawn and from there create a trend graph that can be viewed by the plant metallurgists in "almost real time" and react accordingly to issues that the pics up with the use of these trends.

Up until now I have only used trends to facilitate in trouble shooting metallurgical phenomenon on the plant with the overall aim of achieving and maintaining plant stability and efficiency. I have never physically accessed the data from the scada and created the charts myself.

Can anyone help me in getting this process started or at least point me in the right direction of user manuals to be able to do so

Regards

The following links will help get you started. You will have to ensure that you can establish a link to the Wonderware software. This is usually done by DDE.

https://insource.mindtouch.us/Wonderware_InTouch_HMI/Tech_Notes/InTouch_and_MS_Excel_Communications

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HMebfDdSSXI

The following is a recent post about moving information conditionally in excel.
http://accautomation.ca/excel-conditional-movement-of-data/

This should get you started.
Regards,

I question the use of Excel here. Depending on how you and the plant value your time (and in the spirit of not reinventing the wheel) I think you should look at solutions such as a Data Historian as well as improving the usefulness of the trends. Your vendor should be eager to help or else you should change vendors.

On the other hand, you will learn a lot if you go the way you're talking about, and so it could be a valuable exercise if you're going to do a lot of automation and controls programming.

A data historian is big bucks but so is your time.

I too question the choice of Excel. It really is cr*p when it comes to this sort of work. I can speak from experience after working on several abandoned Excel projects that the original authors themselves wanted nothing more to do with.

At GM they tend to use Excel+VBA for everything, and it really was never intended for that purpose. The uses that involve DDE (just like yours will) tend to be particularly bad.

Try AdvancedHMI.

Just my...