PC-DMIS Professor Webinar on Excel Form Report | CMMXYZ Tech Tips

Lynn: Hi, everyone. Welcome to today's PC-DMIS Webinar on Excel form report. We are very excited to have you here today. My name is Lynn Kubusch. I am the software maintenance agreement specialist here at CMMXYZ. I'd like to introduce today's presenter, my colleague, Trevor McLaughlin. Trevor is an application specialist here at CMMXYZ. You may have spoken to him over the phone or seen him in our tech tips videos that are available on our website. He is also one of our instructors that teaches not only PC-DMIS but many other training courses such as GD&T, statistics, and PolyWorks that are available here at CMMXYZ. I will talk more about that at the end of the presentation. We will now start the PC-DMIS Excel form report webinar with CMM application specialist, Trevor McLaughlin. Over to you, Trevor.
Trevor: Okay, thank you, Lynn. And hello everyone, and thanks for joining me. So today I wanted to talk about the Excel form report and just Excel reporting in general. So let me share my screen here. Okay, so you should be seeing my PC-DMIS screen. So Excel reporting has come a long way over the years. Started off with Wizard PC-DMIS to Excel Wizard, which is now obsolete and is no longer supported and you can't even see it in the menu anymore. After that was discontinued, the other option was to go to file a printing report, window print set up. And here is...I can't remember when this was introduced, maybe 8, 7, 8 years ago. But this is just a real generic kind of a dump your data into Excel and I'll show you what that looks like.
And let's see if I can find that. These ones here. Yeah, so this is that, just from the file printing option. Just dumps the data here. You really don't have too much control over how the data looks. So inversion, let me get my PC-DMIS open. Inversion 2019 R1, they introduced what's called the Excel form report. You can find it in the menu under file, or sorry, insert report command Excel form report. So this actually comes with some preloaded templates. This is a custom one. So we have like a five-part study. So this is an appended report. This is just a one-off report and it's already formatted the way PC-DMIS needs it. What has become popular is the custom reports. So I've got a few examples. Which one should I show you?
Yeah, so here's a custom one I made up that has not yet been, you know, tailored to suit PC-DMIS, like it needs to know certain information. So the way this works is I have some static information here, like part name, serial number, programmer. I'll just quickly show you how we would populate that. So it's really a drag and a drop kind of a system. You can also right-click, refer to, in this case serial number. Programmer is actually a trace field, which I have here. I just called it operator. And then that would populate. So that's linking PC-DMIS program information to your own template, your own company template. DM number, it's a counter. I'll just do this real quick. Type, I'll just show you like a symbol, the dimension type, dimension I.D, or, actually PCD I.D. And this particular template is what's called appended. So it will be one file, but it'll have results for multiple parts.
Yeah, so yeah, I actually have a result column there. It was just something else I was playing with. So I'll just show you how we do that. So it's drag over measured result, and unfortunately, you have to do it for every cell when it's appended. So the result one, it was just something I was playing with some custom formatting in Excel. But just for the sake of filling that in, I'll just put the other tolerance there. So I'm not on a CMM so I can't actually run this, but I'll show you what this looks like after I ran it. So the last step is we actually have to highlight this row, right click and set it as a data area just like that. So that is required. The next thing we can do is go to report settings and choose where we want to put it.
So I just put it in the default folder results. The name of the file will be by default part name, serial number, and also a time and date stamp. But if we are appending this, we cannot include the date and time because the file cannot be different every time it runs. So if there's a timestamp, there'll be multiple files and it will not append. So anyway, I'll just click okay to that. So I don't have enough time to go into every single aspect of this because I really want to talk about something new that was introduced about a year ago. So for now, I'll just create this and then you can see the command there. So I actually have another one that I was working with there. So this is the command here.
And the other thing to note is this command must be after your dimensions or else it will not work. So let me just show you now...which one do I wanna show you? This one here. So this is what that would look like after I run it.