Excel to PLC question (String?) Studio5000

[Just In Time]

I am trying to get some information from an Excel spreadsheet into my PLC
(Allen Bradley 1769-L16ER -BB1B) (Studio5000)

I have an Excel file that is updated on our server every hour. I want to pull the
certain columns from that Excel file every hour. (part number, order quantity, ID number) The "part number" and "ID number" have letters in them.
(ie: A12345B and SIX1234567).

I have seen the DDE/OPC with RSLinx connection send Real numbers and Integers.
Is there an easy way to send my "Part Number" and "ID numbers" that contain letters.

Thanks in advance for your time.

 

[Jmeadows7676]

Open RSLinx, go to help/search and type excel. There are some examples that might help. The last time I needed to do this was years ago but this helped me a lot.

 

[ASF]

Welcome to the forum!

The DDE/OPC process is the same no matter the data type. It's been a while since I played with this, but from memory it'll play nice with data types to the extent that it's reasonably possible. For example, I could send a value of 1 to the PLC, and it would work out what to do with it based on the type of the tag in the PLC.
If the target tag was a bool, it would set the bool to true
If it was an integer, it would give it a value of 1
If the tag was a real, it'd give it the value 1.0
If the tag was a string, the resulting string would be "1"
So, long and short of it, I'd say just give it a try and configure the PLC tags as strings. It'll likely just work!

 

[Jmeadows7676]

Sub Block_Write_String()

'open dde link: testsol=DDE Topic

RSIchan = DDEInitiate("RSLinx", "Rio_Testing")

'write data thru channel

DDEPoke RSIchan, "DDE_TestTag", Range("[RSLINXXL.XLS]DDE_Sheet!C7")

'close dde link

DDETerminate (RSIchan)

End Sub

Create this macro in Excel and Call it how you wish. This is from RSLinx Help but i modified it for a string.