Hi,

I'm trying to make Excel communicate with an external device down a
RS232 cable I want to send a command to it, which will then return a
value to Excel. Does anyone know how to start going about this.

Thanks

Doing serial communications directly in Excel can be extremely tricky.
The easiest way to do what you want to do is to use a program called
WinWedge from TAL Technologies (www.taltech.com)
WinWedge is a utility that is designed to run in the background and
feed incoming serial data directly to other programs by either
stuffing the data through the keyboard buffer (so that the data from
the device looks like it is being typed in on the keyboard) or it can
pass data to other programs using Dynamic Data Exchange (DDE) which is
fully supported by Excel.

WinWedge fully supports 2-way I/O so you can send commands or data out
the serial port to a device. It is also very easy to use and comes
with many examples for Excel.



On 16 Jul 2004 01:40:37 -0700, (Phil) wrote:

Hi,

I'm trying to make Excel communicate with an external device down a
RS232 cable I want to send a command to it, which will then return a
value to Excel. Does anyone know how to start going about this.

Thanks

Doing serial communications directly in Excel can be extremely tricky.
The easiest way to do what you want to do is to use a program called
WinWedge from TAL Technologies (www.taltech.com)
WinWedge is a utility that is designed to run in the background and
feed incoming serial data directly to other programs by either
stuffing the data through the keyboard buffer (so that the data from
the device looks like it is being typed in on the keyboard) or it can
pass data to other programs using Dynamic Data Exchange (DDE) which is
fully supported by Excel.

WinWedge fully supports 2-way I/O so you can send commands or data out
the serial port to a device. It is also very easy to use and comes
with many examples for Excel.



On 16 Jul 2004 01:40:37 -0700, (Phil) wrote:

Hi,

I'm trying to make Excel communicate with an external device down a
RS232 cable I want to send a command to it, which will then return a
value to Excel. Does anyone know how to start going about this.

Thanks

Phil wrote:

Hi,

I'm trying to make Excel communicate with an external device down a
RS232 cable I want to send a command to it, which will then return a
value to Excel. Does anyone know how to start going about this.

Thanks

Just open COM1 as a file and use read or write statements.
Search the web for "Visual Basic" and "serial communication". Whatever
works for VB, also works for Excel/VBA.
Should be very easy!!!

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If it has an "X" in the name, it must be Linux?
Please don't thank me in advance. Thank me afterwards if it works or
hit me in the face if it doesn't. ;-)