Displaying data server data in an Excel spreadsheet

Cascade Connect: Version 4.0
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# 7.2. Displaying data server data in an Excel spreadsheet

By far the easiest way to display data server data in an Excel spreadsheet is to simply name a cell with the same name as the data point coming from the data server. Excel will accept any DDE POKE value from Cascade Connect, and if the message has the same name as the cell, then the cell will display the value part of the message.

## 7.2.1. Naming Cells

Each cell in an Excel spreadsheet can have a unique name. The default name of a cell is the same as that cell's column and row reference.

Figure 7-1. Excel cells and their names

You will notice that each time you select a cell, the name of the cell appears to the upper left of the worksheet area. This is the name of the currently selected cell. You can change the name of a cell by simply clicking inside the naming box and typing a new name.

Figure 7-2. Naming an Excel cell

Alternatively, you can define the names of many cells by accessing the Insert menu and selecting Name, then Define Name.

Figure 7-3. Defining cell names using the Define Name dialog box

Within this dialog box the names of cells, and the reference they hold, can be defined.

| Excel does not allow the use of most punctuation characters in the name of a cell. This is important to consider when naming your data points on the data server.

## 7.2.2. Domain separator character in Excel

When defining names for data points that are from domains other than the default domain you must separate the domain name from the point name by using the domain name separator character.

The default separator character for Cascade Connect is the colon (`:`). Unfortunately, Excel does not recognize the colon as a legal character in a cell name so the period (`.`) character is used instead. The mapping of a colon to a period character takes place within Cascade Connect and is defined in the Domain Separator field in Domain Settings of the Setup window.

When cells in a spreadsheet are named to reference tags in another domain the syntax is:

        domain.tagname

This is shown in the figure below:

Figure 7-4. Referencing data tags from other domains

Here we have a spreadsheet with a reference to a data point called `LIC08_MV` from a Cascade DataHub named `remote`.

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