Wincc basic alarms

Hi,

I have just switched to using TIA Portal Wincc basic and am trying to get to grips with setting up alarms for my HMI basic panel. Surprise surpise the documentation from Siemens is nothing short of appalling, it is all text based with no tutorials for first time users, or if there is help it is so hidden away that it takes hours to find. Anyway I digress..

What I would like to know is how to assign alarms to individual boolean values in my PLC. When usings S7-300's and S7-400 I almost always place all of my alarms in boolean form in datablocks so I have done the same thing for this S7-1200 project. When I go to add the alarms into the HMI alarms section it is requiring me to add in words and then set a trigger value for each. This seems odd because how do I deal with multiple alarms going off at the same time. I might have completely got the wrong end of the stick here but realistically all I want to do is import my alarms from my datablocks into the HMI alarms section and then assign text to each alarm. Is this too much to ask???

Hope someone can help. Incidentally does anyone else find TIA portal must slower to use than Simatic manager for even the simpler stuff?

Bob

It's a trigger bit.
Which bit of said word triggers the alarm.
It can handle multiple alarms, you just need to specify which bit triggers it.
If you select a word as alarm tag for instance, you'd only be able to select a value from 0 tot 15.

And yeah, this way of linking alarms is quite annoying. Used to be able to just point at a word in a DB and say: The next 60 words are alarms.
Now it's tag per tag.
A HUGE step back.

Many thanks Jeebs, I worked out the trigger bit eventually and I can see why they want you to use ints/words as it means less overhead for the comms. Like you say it's a pain that you have to setup each tag manually.