Automation.com presents the data entry management of XLReporter

XLReporter’s data entry component, Interactive Forms, is designed to set up the entire solution in the familiar environment of Excel, taking advantage of XLReporter’s ability to deploy it across the network for gathering and storing information to a central database. Once deployed, users access the forms according to their credentials. Information entered in the forms is saved to the database using web services which ensures the integrity of the information and the security of the database. Interactive Forms is ideal for any industry that enters data manually, such as user recordings or laboratory results, combining it with automatically collected data for reporting without bringing in IT specialists.

Support for most databases, including Microsoft SQL Server and Access, ensures that Interactive Forms can be used in any industry, large or small.

The second new reporting component, the File Cabinet, addresses obstacles users face when creating reports from text files. Text files, like those created by data loggers, are usually generated periodically and consequently a report may span hundreds of files. Also, because the file content is text, analytics can only be produced with specialized tools or programming.

The File Cabinet technology enables the user to stitch together the data from disparate files into a single entity to produce reports that go beyond each text file. In addition, the File Cabinet automatically creates and maintains a list of tag names so tags can be simply selected by XLReporter’s tag browsers. It features filtering and sorting together with analytic calculations such as the average for each hour of a day.

Analytic calculations are also provided for historians. XLReporter is widely used with leading historians and SCADA systems by GE Intelligent Platforms, Wonderware, Rockwell Software, Emerson Process Management, and Siemens together with industry standards such as OPC, OPC-HDA, ODBC and OLE-DB.