Question

I have a small Win32 console application which is essentially a test harness. I read data in, do some processing on it and currently just output some of the numbers to the console. This isn’t a huge problem – I can get an idea of what the data looks like, but it would be much easier to analyse if there was a way of getting that information into a graph for each run of the software.

I’ve been getting to grips with GNUPlot recently, but can’t work out a simple way to get the data sent to it. Has anyone tried this? ..or is there another graphing application I should try?

Excel and OO Calc are great tools and I’ve loaded .csv data into them for graphing data plenty of times myself. I was, however, hoping for a way to dynamically pipe data into a graphing application to avoid having to close/reopen excel and plot a graph each time I want to look at some data.

I think you can pipe data into GNUPlot (which is why I mentioned it) but the details of how to do so are rather scant.

Answer 1

You don’t really need to touch VBA to do this

In Excel you can set up a Data Connection to a file, it supports many files type but CSV does work fine.

• Go to List item
• Data Tab
• Click Connections
• Click Add
• select the file
• go to the connection properties – un-tick prompt for file name
• set the required period.
• close the connections dialog
• select the start cell for importing the data – cell 1a on worksheet 2
• click existing connections
• select you data connection
• flip to worksheet1 add your chart and hookup the data.

the chart will now update automatically

this is Excel 2007 – but think older version had this and I think OO can do it to.