-------------------------Monitor------------------------ The Newsletter for PC-Based Data Acquisition and Control Issue 66 www.windmill.co.uk January 2004 --------------------ISSN 1472-0221---------------------- Welcome to the first Monitor of 2004, and a happy and prosperous New Year to you. This month we would be very grateful if you could complete a short survey to help us improve the newsletter and our service. It also gives you a chance to comment on our performance or anything else you'd like to talk to us about. We hope you find the newsletter useful, but should you wish to cancel your subscription please do so at https://www.windmill.co.uk/newsletter.html CONTENTS ======== * New Year Survey * Windmill News: New Version of People Counting Software * Excel Corner: How to Show Live Data in a Form ________________________________________________________ ________________________________________________________ New Year Survey ________________________________________________________ As an aid to improving Monitor, and our technical support service, we are again seeking your views. We would be very grateful if you could answer these few questions and return the survey to us at monitor@windmillsoft.com (Just press the Reply button and fill in the blanks.) All information is confidential and won't be passed to any third parties. Miss out any questions you don't want to answer.________________________________________________________ ________________________________________________________ Windmill News: New version of VTupload, the people counting program ________________________________________________________ We've improved our people counting program, VTupload. Previously the software could count people passing through up to 120 entrances per site. The new version, however, has no such limit. Additionally, much more flexibility has been built into VTupload by means of "calculated channels". A simple use of these is to combine readings from several doorways to calculate people going through multiple entrances into a store. Previously you would have to have performed these calculations using other analysis software, like Excel. Now VTupload will record all the counts from individual doorways and the total count for several doorways. VTupload saves its counts in a text file, which you can open using any word processing, spreadsheet or other analysis program. The software monitors logging units connected to a PC's COM ports. The connections may be over RS232, RS485 or Ethernet. For more details contact sales@biodataltd.com Related Topics: Monitor Issue 61, Windmill Chosen for New People Counting System https://www.windmill.co.uk/monitor61.html ________________________________________________________ ________________________________________________________ Excel Corner: How to Show Live Data in a Form ________________________________________________________ Using the Windmill DDE Panel, it's very easy to set up live data links in an Excel worksheet. But one of our readers wanted to have a live link in the text box of an Excel form. Here's how. 1. Set up a data link from the Windmill DDE Panel to Excel. - Start displaying data in DDE Panel - Select a channel and choose to Copy to Clipboard. - Select Data as the type if information to copy, and press the Copy Selected Channels button. - In Excel open a new blank workbook and go to cell A2 of Sheet1. - Choose Paste Special from the Edit menu and paste the data as a link. Excel will now show live data from DDE Panel updating at the Panel's refresh rate. 2. In Excel Visual Basic Editor, create a form and call it UserForm1. 3. Add a text box and call it LinkChannel 4. Still in Visual Basic Editor, select Sheet 1 and insert this code Private Sub Worksheet_Calculate() UserForm1.Show 0 UserForm1.LinkChannel.Text = Worksheets("Sheet1").Cells(2, 1).Text End Sub 5. From the File menu select Close and Return to Microsoft Excel. The Worksheet_Calculate subroutine runs whenever a change in a cell's data causes Excel to recalculate. In our example it means that whenever a DDE link updates, the form will also update. One thing to be aware of is that if the DDE link should be lost (apart from by closing the DDE Panel) the spreadsheet can freeze. To stop the form being updated, close down DDE Panel. If you have trouble editing your form, due to repeated returns to the spreadsheet on every data update, either set a long refresh rate in DDE Panel or close it down. * Further Reading: For more on using Windmill with Excel see https://www.windmill.co.uk/excel/ For notes on creating a form in Excel see http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx ________________________________________________________ ________________________________________________________ * Copyright Windmill Software Ltd * Reprinting permitted with this notice included * For more articles see https://www.windmill.co.uk We are happy for you to copy and distribute this newsletter, and use extracts from it on your own web site or publication, providing the above notice is included and a link back to our website is in place. An archive of previous issues is at https://www.windmill.co.uk/newsletter.html and an index of articles at https://www.windmill.co.uk/newsletter.html Windmill Software Ltd, PO Box 58, North District Office, Manchester, M8 8QR, UK Telephone: +44 (0)161 834 6688 Facsimile: +44 (0)161 833 2190 E-mail: monitor@windmillsoft.com https://www.windmill.co.uk/ https://www.windmillsoft.com/
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