Report generation and office 2016

[Chrispbrown2255]

We have an application that was built using Labview 2013 and tested and deployed it on a computer using Office 2010.  The program worked fine.

We are now trying to get this application to work with Office 2016, we ran into loads of errors.  I installed Labview 2015 SP1 with the 2015 report generation toolkit.

Most of the reporting functions work with Office 2016, excel 2016 integration seems to be flawless for what we are doing.  The only one that we are having an issue with is trying to put graphs into Word 2016.  Putting strings and numbers into word 2016 is fine, it's just graphs that don't work.

 I know office 2016 isn't on the compatibility list, but I'm wondering if someone else has seen this issue.

I have attached the error generating VI and the error message.

[natasftw]

It looks like the ActiveX calls will need to be updated for Office 2016.  The error is being thrown by ActiveX.

I'd expect this problem to go away when the RGT lists Office 2016 as a compatibility.

[Chrispbrown2255]

Is there a workaround that doesn't involve ActiveX?

Any idea when NI are going to update RGT?

[jarden]

I would like to know when the update is coming as well.  The only way I can open the excel files is by opening Excel, and then opeing the file through excel.  Then it delimits.  Very time consuming.  

[Chrispbrown2255]

Hi Jarden,

  I got this from NI yesterday.

Thanks very much for sending me that piece of code. It allowed me to replicate 
the problem perfectly, and I was able to trace the error to an ActiveX method 
which the update graph VI calls through a subVI. It appears that this is a 
symptom of the incompatibility between the 2015 version of the Report 
Generation Toolkit and the 2016 version of Office. Microsoft have changed 
something in Office which means that this particular method doesn’t work 
anymore. It seems that most of the rest of the toolkit works without fault, so 
we can definitely look for a workaround which doesn’t use this VI, however the 
value in this depends on the impact of this incompatibility and the timeframe 
for this project. The 2016 version of this toolkit should, I believe, support 
Office 2016, and it will be released with LabVIEW 2016 in the next few months, 
so one potential solution would be to wait for this functionality to become 
available.

What’s the current impact of this? The easiest solution would be to wait for 
the software to become officially compatible, but if this is having a serious 
impact or will run into a deadline (e.g. your IT department requires an update 
to Office 2016) in the next 2 months or so then we can definitely discuss 
whether there is a way around using this VI as a stopgap workaround.

In my case I am now working to import the graph as an image rather than a graph.

[jarden]

It's not just the toolkit.  It is the whole excel importer.   I do not have the report generation software.  I just use what is in the base (write to file LVM txt), and I still have the issue.  Hope there is an overall patch soon. 

[MarredCheese]

I had the same problem as discussed here - that Labview 2015's report generation tools do not work with Office 2016.  I upgraded to Labview 2016 as NI told Chrispbrown2255 to do, but that doesn't seem to work with Office 2016 either.  Is there any solution on NI's end?  Or is my only recourse to reinstall Office 2013?

[Chrispbrown2255]

Hi Marred Cheese,

  the problem is that the 2016 development suite still uses labview 2015 and labview RGT 2015.  I have been told that when RGT 2016 is available it will include full compatibility with Office 2016.

As for my specific problem I found a workaround, all of my report generation vi's were working apart from the update graph.vi for MS word, so unless you are trying to update a graph in a word document/template then as far as I could tell there were no other issues.  The Labview engineer that I spoke too also said that they hadn't been made aware of any other issues with office 2016/RGT 2015.

I ended up using invoke nodes to convert my graphs to a .png image then insert the .png into the correct place within the word document/template as a short term fix.  You do lose some of the formatting freedom that you would have had previously, but I've just added it as a case if it detects that the computer it's running on has office 2016 installed.

When the updated RGT is released I will revert to the update graph.vi method.

[MarredCheese]

@Chrispbrown2255 wrote:

Hi Marred Cheese,

  the problem is that the 2016 development suite still uses labview 2015 and labview RGT 2015.  I have been told that when RGT 2016 is available it will include full compatibility with Office 2016.

As for my specific problem I found a workaround, all of my report generation vi's were working apart from the update graph.vi for MS word, so unless you are trying to update a graph in a word document/template then as far as I could tell there were no other issues.  The Labview engineer that I spoke too also said that they hadn't been made aware of any other issues with office 2016/RGT 2015.

I ended up using invoke nodes to convert my graphs to a .png image then insert the .png into the correct place within the word document/template as a short term fix.  You do lose some of the formatting freedom that you would have had previously, but I've just added it as a case if it detects that the computer it's running on has office 2016 installed.

When the updated RGT is released I will revert to the update graph.vi method.

---

When I installed the developer suite, it installed Labview 2016 for sure.  I now have both 2015 and 2016 installed.

Are you saying the report generation VIs that come with Labview 2016 haven't been updated to work with Office 2016 yet but are scheduled to be updated later?

[ben64]

I do not currently have Office 2016 installed but on a PC with Office 2016 I had some issues with some ActiveX properties and methods when the Excel/Word window was in a minimized state. You may not use a minimize window but if you do it worth a try.

Ben64