Specifications

RSLinx – Training Guide 57
Training Section 7: Establishing a DDE Link to Microsoft
Excel
Once a DDE topic is configured, you are ready to establish a DDE Hot Link to Microsoft
Excel. There are two ways to establish a DDE Hot Link to Excel, the hard way and the
easy way. The hard way is to type it by hand with all the proper syntax marks in place,
but we will try it the easy way using the Windows clipboard. The clipboard will copy only
hot links.
This exercise will establish a Hot Link to Excel to read a block of five timer accumulators
from a PLC-5 and create an active graph of the data in Excel. We will use T4:0 through
T4:4 - it is essential that these timers exist in the data table section of the PLC-5. Excel
97 is used for this exercise, other versions of Excel would be similar with slightly
different keystrokes or mouse clicks.
Lab/Discussion:
1. If RSLinx is not already running, start it now.
2. Select Edit/Copy DDE Link to Clipboard ( or use the icon in the
toolbar that looks similar to the typical windows Paste icon.)
• A Copy Link to Clipboard box will appear.
3. The Data Table Address you wish to copy goes in the first block, in this case, we’ll
use the default address: T4:0.ACC.
4. In the Block Size box enter a 5. This is the length of the block copy that will be
made, five timer accumulators starting at address T4:0.ACC.
Note: The Copy/Paste
DDE Link feature
is not available
with RSLinx Lite.
If there is more than one topic,
select the required topic here
by just clicking on it.