Copy & paste symbols in Excel

[carbonat 0]

Hi, I've been doing omron plc programming for years on the Spanish Version of Everything. Just recently I had to change the language format settings of windows to English. Just for those of you that don't know what the effect of it is I can mention that the most noticeable changes are decimal points ('.' for English and ',' for Spanish) and csv files delimiters ( ',' for English and ';' for Spanish). Now, the problem is when I try the usual trick of copy&paste between CX-Programmer and Excel for BOOL symbols in the CIO area. Since the English format uses '.' as decimal point, when a symbol address in the CIO area is copied into Excel it is interpreted a number. Thus, the address 200.10 becomes 200.1 in Excel and therefore it is interpreted back to 200.01 when copied and pasted back to CX-Programmer. This does not happen for the Spanish format because Excel does not try to understand 200.10 as a number so it leaves it unchanged as text and pasting it back to CX-Programmer goes as expected. I know that once a symbol is pasted into Excel I can reformat its address to contain two decimal characters, but this seems (sort of) odd after having programmed for years without having to change anything for that copying and pasting worked in both directions. Is what I describe the usual behavior when English is used? I mean do you always have to make adjustments to an Excel file copied from Cx-Programming in order to properly paste it back to Cx-Programmer or am I missing something? Thanks,

[ParaffinPower 13]

Hello carbonat I have the same problem. I format the address column to 'text' and it works well. Pp

[Michael Walsh 268]

ParaffinPower is correct, changing the format works well particularly for copy / paste. Another option for an individual cell is to put a ' in front of the number. For instance type '200.10 . Of course you would have to do this for each cell, but for a quick addition, it works well. Edited 13 Jul 2009 by Michael Walsh

[PMCR 66]

I saw a handy multi-language tool in CX Programmer 8 the other day. I don't know how may versions back this goes. You can have multiple languages setup for the Comments column (but not the symbol). Go into the Edit / IO Comment menus. Put a check mark in 'Show Multiple comments'. You can copy / paste the comments into and out of Excel, but the addresses do not copy / paste, just the comments. So, you should set your comments up as you normally would in the Symbol Table, then add a second language through this tool.

[carbonat 0]

That's an interesting feature. I never realized of it before, thanks. I was already there in CX-Programmer 7 as I've seen. However, unfortunately this does not solve the copy&paste issue for the English locale, and you still have to be careful with decimal places at the right of the decimal point. To complicate things still more I just realized another (much worse) problem when switching from the Spanish to the English locale or back: Some CX-Programmer projects saved with one particular locale will not open properly in another locale because of the use of different decimal points. In particular if you have a project containing Constant REAL values in it (such as for example this piece of ladder or mnemonic: ">F D200 +0.1") then this project may not be compatible among language versions. What happens is that apparently the Spanish version stores the constant as 0,1 and the English version as 0.1, so they can not be understood when opened back in the wrong language. This is completely unacceptable because binary project files are supposed to be compatible among language versions, as they are for *all* other software packages, even if decimal points end to be displayed differently depending on the language. This of course does not happen with excel or any other software. Excel files are excel files, period. You can open them in Spanish, English, Croatian (just to say) or whatever, you may not be able to read the meaning of some text the creator has placed in it it, but the file will open correctly and the numbers will show properly. That's a BIG issue of CX-Programmer I think.

[Gary.Johnson 0]

I made a template (.xlt) file with one tab for bit level comments and symbols. Another tab is formatted with 0 decimal places for word level (DM/HR/Channels) stuff. A shortcut to that template sits on the desktop. Saves time and frustration.