Using Excel To Manage CX-Supervisor Points

Introduction

CX-Supervisor allows you to copy and paste from the point editor into Excel and back again. This can be useful if you want to duplicate lots of points and for example only change the memory address and name. You simply copy the point or multiple points from CX-Supervisor and paste into Excel. You can then use the features of Excel to duplicate the lines and modify as needed. Once you have a list of points in Excel, you can copy and paste them back into CX-Supervisor.

Problem with Sorting By Memory Address

Sometimes it can be useful to use Excel to sort the points to help you organise them. Excel offers this feature, however it only sorts numerically or alphabetically. This causes problems for memory addresses which use a letter followed by a number as these are not treated as numbers so you may have a list of addresses as follows:

when you sort the list by address order in Excel it gets sorted alphabetically (not numerically) as:

Solution

We can make Excel sort this correctly by adding an extra column which pads out the address with leading zeros, this means that the values can be sorted alphabetically and be in the correct numerical order too. The attached xls file has an extra column which contains a formula to do this automatically so the above list would now be sorted as follows:

With the extra column which looks like:

When you load the attached file into Excel you will see that the sample points are currently sorted on column F (the memory address without the padding). This puts D1 and D3 at opposite ends of the list even though they are near to each other. If you now choose to sort based on column S (the column with the padding), the sorting is what you would expect for memory addresses.

Note: When you are sorting in Excel, make sure you highlight all the rows (except the headers) that you want to sort, otherwise you'll just sort a single column within the data!

When you want to paste back into CX-Supervisor, make sure you don't highlight the extra column and remember that CX-Supervisor will append a number to a point name if its a duplicate of a point already in the list.

Conclusion

Using the features of CX-Supervisor and Excel and the attached spreadsheet, you can copy a list of points, paste them into Excel, sort them based on memory address. This allows you to manage your point list more effectively before pasting newly created points back into CX-Supervisor.

Please note that this example doesn't sort extended memory (EM) or bit addresses.

Link:
http://www.myomron.com/index.php?action=kb&print=1331