"Export data to Excel" graph method stopped working after Excel downgrade

[Cente90]

Hello everyone,

I recently released an application (developed with LV 2012 SP1) to a customer company, providing it with a PC that runs Windows 10 and had the Office trial version installed; since the expiration date for the latter passed, they uninstalled Office 2016 and installed the 2010 version, of which they had bought a license previously. From that moment on, the "Export data to Excel" operation didn't work anymore for all the graphs in my program (no errors occur, just nothing happens at all when they give the command).

Since it was done by "mouse click - export - export data to excel" and not programmatically there is no code involved, it's just a matter of the LabVIEW method.

My program provides various other exporting functions, but that was the only one that allowed them to export a subset of a graph given by the scales ranges selected, so they found it useful. Does anyone know if there is anything I can do to get that function back to work without compiling a new software equipped with an algorithm to make up for it? And does anyone have any idea of how might the problem be related to the Excel downgrade operation?

Thanks in advance.

[Bob_Schor]

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@Cente90 wrote:

Hello everyone,

I recently released an application (developed with LV 2012 SP1) to a customer company, providing it with a PC that runs Windows 10 and had the Office trial version installed; since the expiration date for the latter passed, they uninstalled Office 2016 and installed the 2010 version, of which they had bought a license previously.

If I understand your statement, above, you provided a PC with software that worked with the operating system on the PC you also supplied, and with Trial Software that you included on that PC.  I presume that your customer paid for the PC, the Windows 10 license, and the LabVIEW program that you provided that required the presence of the Trial Software.  This sounds like an oversight on your part, as your customer was faced with an unanticipated "after-sales" cost to convert the Trial Office License into a fully-licensed Product.

My advice would be to get the customer to return the PC to you (at your expense).  You would then install Office 2016, assign the license to your customer, ensure that your Product still functions, and return the now-working system to your customer, apologizing for your oversight.  This can only build good Customer Relations (we all Make Mistakes).  A less-good (in my opinion) option would be to redevelop your Product on your customer's machine that has Office 10 installed, again at your expense.

Bob Schor

[Cente90]

Not exactly: the trial license I am talking about is the Office 2016 one, which was already included in the PC we supplied to the customer. No versions of Office were included as explicit part of the sale, neither Office is necessary for my software to run. However, since the customer believed it was useful for them to have a full version of Office installed in the PC, they used the trial version until it expired, and then they installed an Office 2010 version of which they had bought the license on their own.

[Bob_Schor]

You make a not-entirely-unreasonable response.  The obvious Best Fix would be to figure out how to make your code work with Office 2010, and provide them with a suitable Patch.  Probably the easiest/fastest way to do this is to simply "redevelop" your product for the system that they have, namely a Windows 10 machine with Office 2010 and LabVIEW 2012.  I suspect that there may be no "direct" patch for getting code compiled for Office 2016 to work with Office 2010, but I'm not an expert on this question ...

An alternative would be to explain to your customer that your code was designed for Office 2016, and by removing this component of your program, the capability of exporting to Excel was lost.  An obvious "fix" for the customer would be to upgrade Office 2010 to Office 2016 (you can negotiate at whose expense), and for you to ensure that your software still works following this "customer repair".  Depending on where the customer is located, it may be preferable for you to handle this upgrade yourself, either on-site, remotely, or after the PC is returned to you.

Bob Schor

P.S. -- I've also encountered issues running programs I've developed on "other machines".  My latest "oops" was planning to run on a new PC, itself probably "up" to the task, but with a network drop having (probably) insufficient bandwidth to handle the anticipated data rates.  Fortunately, a colleague had a data acquisition machine connected to a gigabit TCP/IP line ...

[Cente90]

Well, actually it's not a customer care issue anymore: after I questioned LabVIEW community about this, we were able to find an agreement with the customer (which also demonstrated to be quite easy-going about the situation indeed) about what to do. However, the curiosity to understand what may have caused the method to stop working after the downgrade remained inside me (as I said, there is no code by me involved: it's just about right-clicking on the graph and selecting Export-Export data to Excel): I also tested the method with a LV 2012 SP1 + Office 2010 machine, and it worked fine.