One of the more popular features of DataLink is the ability
to add a Trend Control similar to that of
ProcessBook into a spreadsheet, and have that,
have that Trend Control behave
as if you were looking at a ProcessBook display.
To do this, we are going to
put a Trend inside this spreadsheet.
I am going to select PI and Insert Trend.
And, this is one of the only features
in DataLink that actually has a Wizard. A Wizard is one of these
functions that steps you through various dialog
boxes. And you can see at the top, you can have data
on the worksheet or data from PI are in your Trend.
I am going to have both appear in my Trend to show you how this works.
And, if I select Data from worksheet, what I
do is select a range of
cells that have both a recognizable
timestamp and a value. And, I click Add
to add that to my, to my
elements in my, in my Trend.
Now, if it is an array of data, you can have it
pick up the entire array. And if you do want a stepped plot
and not interpolated, you can have that
function as well. I am also going to get
data from PI by doing a simple Tag Search.
And the Tag Search I am going to do
is for my CDT tag that I have been
using. And I will use the CDT
tag from -- CDT158 for my localhost.
And, if I wanted to actually show the values on the Trend,
I need to select Markers. And, you can adjust
their order in the list and, and whatnot here.
You click Next, and it's going to ask you what you want to use
as the time for the Trend. Now, you can either use
a hard-coded time as we have shown here. I
use one of the PI time abbreviations,
as I am typing in here, or
you can use cell references by clicking on
these buttons, and then indicating which cell you wanted
to use. I am going to Enable Updates because I want my
Trend to be live. I will click Next,
and the only thing really left to do is give the
Trend a title. You do not have
to give a Trend a title, but you, you can if you'd like.
And click Finish. And what you will see
when you look at your Trend
is all the data from the worksheet and all of the data
from your PI System.
One of the nice features about the Trend Control is that it does show
questionable, annotations
and the substituted flag on the Trend
Object itself.
When you have a Trend in an Excel spreadsheet,
one of the things you have to realize about the Trend
is that it does not
have any of the Toolbar Buttons that ProcessBook has.
And because of that reason, in order
to control the Trend, we need to have a mechanism
in place to do that. And the way you do that is through the
right click. When you right click on the Trend and
[inaudible], all of the functions that you can do to the
Trend appear in the Context Menu. So,
if I wanted to, for some reason, add a
scrollbar to this Trend so I could go back and forth
in time, I could have that appear on my
Trend. I can turn that off by simply right
clicking and un-checking the box. If I want to zoom
in on this Trend, I can do that as well. To
revert back, I simply right click and revert.
One of the other popular
functions is Export Data. If I wanted to
export the data from my Trend onto my
spreadsheet, I simply give the spreadsheet
a starting point for my,
for my data. I want to use the Trace Name as the heading.
And click OK. And you can see that
I have data here that's from my spreadsheet,
and I have data here that's from my PI Server.
So the Export Data function is one of the
nice functions about this. If
you want to change the formatting or the definition of
the Trend, you can select that within the right
menu as well. So, I can change any of
the features of my Trend,
including the
formatting of the Trend, and this would include
things like trace colors.
You can see the trace color I have is --
the first trace color's green. My second trace color is
blue. You have different options
of formatting and whatnot. So, you have
a lot of control over the
visual aspect of the Trend itself.