Extracting graph data from an image

 

What I am really needing is one that can be driven from a programming language – not a GUI. But here is a list of my research thus far.

Excel XLA or addin help – how to link in a help file

Using a chm file – here is how (scroll waaaaay down) to link your help file and your function. I want to do this pro grammatically and generate a link automatically. We will see how that goes.

Did you know you can get all of your VBA code extracted to a text file procedure by procedure (using VBA itself?) I made an export tool for all my modules, but I always wanted to add help like they do in c# (sandcastle style) and link to a help file. Check this link. I have so much code now I am going crazy.

Filemaker hosting options

First,

[UPDATE: I think I am in the wrong business – I think I should no become a Filemaker hosting company. One can make some good $$] I have never seen software so easy to install and use as Filemaker Server. Open one port on your fire wall  (5003) and you have a hosting solution and very stable (you never touch it and it backs up and backs up etc. etc faithfully. Truely Apple software – do keep in mind as you read – that I am quite biased to doing it on your own. But I will try my best to be objective.

However, if you have nightmares from other products and don’t want to worry at all, here are some links Continue reading

Piggy backing on an Excel Instance – even when there are a few in Task Manager

So I found 1 great article that looked promising but it didn’t pan out because it was written before a change by Excel. Basically the problem is that GetObject (or c# GetActiveObject) only gets a RANDOM copy of a running instance. If there is more than one instance of Excel, for instance, and you are searching for a workbook (in my case one with a specific named range) you will not find the workbook unless you iterate through all the Application instances of Excel. If you look in Task Manager … why are there two? Simple. If you are in explorer and you click on a .xls* file and the preview pane is on – it starts an instance of Excel (one example).

Here is the article that did not work and here is a complicated one that is just as good as the GetObject (it gets only once instance) … HOWEVER … combining the two … now that is magic. I got it working. This article is a sub-article of the last post in which I iterated over all apps searching for a .visible instance in which to piggy back and run VBA the code in Excel. Why? Because I had LOTS of previous code already written in Excel – I just needed it to run. It starts and drives AutoCAD. Continue reading

A custom clickable url opens autocad and zooms into a specific AutoPLANT/AutoCad part. I can’t believe I pulled this off

So, for now this article is a list of links that I used to pull this off. It is VERY rough  but, I have LOTS of VBA code in Excel that I want to reuse but have Excel VBA triggered FROM THE WEB when a piping designer clicks on it. [Update: it fully works and is in use!] The link drives the existing VBA in excel which in turn, drives the running instance of Autocad and does lots of things – in this case I want to reuse my code that opens an autocad drawing, iterates through all the components until the one you want is found, then it zooms into an AutoCad component of the currently selected cell.

This link is in a SSRS (Report Services) page that we already have to find components based on the long and short description from AutoPLANT. Here is the round trip discussion and the links I used are at the bottom. I can’t believe I did this. Super cool. Continue reading

Jackpot – finally found answers of using SQL from an Excel workbook on the data IN THAT SAME workbook

In order of usefulness here are a set of links for myself to fully investigate. I did this before but if you use the wrong key words in Google – you pull up pupkis – now I used a different set of keywords and I pulled up a goldmine.  Here they are in order of usefulness or in order of what I will try first. I want a solution with the least hassle for my customers to install on their own computers.

Automate Navisworks from Autodesk … links to get started. Finally I have an excuse.

I am trying to automate Navisworks for the first time and my first use is to use a tabular Excel sheet to locate and step through items for Quality Control purposes. There are many other uses I have in my head, but this is the start.