Hello, I am recieving a 'Can not bind DSDM server' message when I open the DDE Share Manager. I have found a few things that may have told me why this happened but none to help me fix this. Is there any help out there? Thanks. My intentions are to have multiple PCs use excel files to read data from PLC's on our network with Linx Gateway installed on one PC.

You should be able to make this work, but be advised that Microsoft is phasing DDE and the COM protocol it uses out as data exchange medium. If you're setting this up from the start you'd be better to use the OPC Server feature of RSlinx and write OPC code into your Excel Sheets. The overhead is slightly more than DDE, but the performance and other odds and ends rocks.

Thanks for the reply, I have one pretty in depth workbook that has a ton of macros written in VBA so that one may be alot of work to change, I have cut and pasted some stuff and made it work but have minimal VB experience. My company is in the process of deciding if they should standardize the way they get info from PLCs and my plant is kind of stuck in limbo. We had an available license for Gateway so I changed a spreadsheet to use it over the network instead of WinLinx through a phone modem. I thought I would tinker around with getting info with the Gateway to see what options are out there. I had trouble getting the OPC test client working and couldn't find much info so I didn't want to spend much time on it not knowing if we would go that way or not. Is there any detailed instructions on how to setup OPC and/or examples of code?

I found the following in the AB Download Section of MRPLC

http://forums.mrplc.com/index.php?autocom=...mp;showfile=741

http://forums.mrplc.com/index.php?showtopic=9292

http://forums.mrplc.com/index.php?showtopic=14759

http://forums.mrplc.com/index.php?showtopic=13170

http://forums.mrplc.com/index.php?showtopic=12381

And this just scratches the surface of a search for OPC* in the MRPLC Allenbradley Forum