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Excel Templates in Autosave

The Easy Method

Date Written: 6-23-2008
Revision Date:
SoundCheck Version: 7.0+

Excel templates are a great way to keep your data organized when you are running the same sequence repeatedly and want to save several pieces of data each time.  They allow you to customize the layout of your data and even create your own additional worksheets with extra data like graphs, statistics, or summaries. 

Step 1 – Write your sequence
Before you can begin developing a template your sequence should be nearly complete, and the names for your data should be finalized.  SoundCheck relies on these data names that you see in the memory list for creating the tabs in Excel.  If you change your data names after you’ve created the Excel template, you will have to go back and rename the tabs in your template accordingly.

Step 2 – Create autosave step(s)
Insert an autosave step in your sequence, and configure it to save your data to Excel.  Go through and choose all your parameters, but select ‘None’ for the header.  If you are saving curves you may wish to only select the ‘Y’ axis.  This will result in the X axis being printed once at the beginning of the Excel file, and only the Y axis data will append after that. 

You may wish to have multiple autosave steps appending to the same file.  The benefit of this is that you can save different data types with unique formats but keep the data confined to a single file.  You may also want to have your data and results autosaved via different steps, as the option to save them simultaneously has been removed in SoundCheck 8.  In my example you will see that I am using 3 separate autosave steps. 

 

The autosave step on the left is saving the bulk of my data.  I am saving only the Y axis, because I don’t need the X or Z axis values for most of the data.  The step on the right is nearly identical to the one on the left except for the axis choice.  Here I am saving only the Z axis, because the piece of data being saved is phase information.    

These two steps are set to append to the same file.  This is done by selecting Excel as the data format, and choosing the same data folder and filename settings.  In this particular example the first autosave step will open Excel, save the data, and then close Excel. The second step will repeat this procedure, appending to the file that was just created.   

The third autosave step (below) is set to save the results of my two limit steps.  Otherwise the settings are identical to the first step, and the data will again be saved to the single Excel file. 

 

Step 3 – Create Initial Excel File
Now that you have created your autosave step(s) it is time to run the sequence so that the Excel file is created.  You will use this initial file to create the template.  This saves a lot of time, because the initial Excel file is already configured exactly for your data, both in terms of worksheet names and data headers.  Here is the initial save file from my example sequence:

Step 3 – Create the Template
Open your initial Excel file and save it as a new file, probably with the word ‘template’ in the name so that you don’t accidentally overwrite it later.  Note that the template should be a .xls file, not a .xlt Excel template.  Go through each tab of the Excel file, deleting the initial data but leaving the top line header.  If desired, create an extra worksheet at the end to enter your custom data and links to the other worksheets.  In my attached example template you will see that I’ve added a ‘Summary’ sheet after the data worksheets so that I can see all the data from each test on a single page instead of having to scan through each of the tabs.  This is especially useful for production tests and creating an overall pass/fail result. 

Step 5 – Use the Template in the Sequence
Go back into your sequence and set each of the autosaves to use your new Excel template.  Now when the sequence is run SoundCheck will enter the data into this template and save it as a new Excel file according to your Filename settings.  If the file already exists SoundCheck will continue appending to it. 

Here is my Excel file after saving two units worth of data with the template:

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