data from serial port to excel

[PrinceNai]

Dear All,

I'm currently breaking my head over a problem with an A6 GSM module. One out of 20 or so times it just doesn't send the message, the program hangs. Of course it never ever happens when I'm looking into the terminal spying for a mistake in my code or for an unexpected answer from the module itself. So I went looking for something free that would write serial data directly to Excel or Access and came across this:

http://individual.utoronto.ca/ddubins/GetCSV.xlsm

on this page:

https://playground.arduino.cc/Main/Excel

It works as a charm. All credits to Mr. or Ms. dndubins

Best regards and happy New Year,

Samo

[temtronic]

I went the PIC hardware method. Used a 'datalogger' (Vinculum, years ago...others sell cheaper modules) connected to a spare serial HW port. Even at 115k200 I never lost a bit of data over years of logging. By storing it in CSV format, it was instantly imported into spreadsheet.
The problem I saw using PIC->TTLUSB device->serial ap->eXcel was that unless the PC is very, very 'lean and clean' you'd lose data. There's a LOT of code between the PIC and the spreadsheet. First the PC has to properly control the USB side of the interface, then there's the 'serial ap' that unless you've got the complete source code, you can't debug, then of course Windows. It has to control all this. Not a hard task BUT if it's also looking for emails, doing background updates, surfing the web, running the PICIDE...well, Windows is known for 'dropping the ball'.
Now I did use RealTerm to display/log data from a PIC when I misplaced the Vinculum last year. It properly displayed the data and stored it in a file. I could also 'look back' in the buffered data to see what I needed.

just some options...

Jay

[Ttelmah]

Yes. In fact if you read the comments by the creator of the script used to do this, he had problems over 9600bps. Like you, I quite commonly generate comma deliminated files to allow data to be directly imported into a spreadsheet for display, and find keeping the handler 'simple' the way to go for reliable fast transfers.