Excel exchange issues

Hi there.

I've been trying to get Excel exchange to work but I'm running into the following issues:

1. My base data is in an excel 2013 macro-enabled spreadsheet ie *.xlsm, which is not recognised by the dialogue box. I can type in the full name, so I guess I can get around this point. Eventually (perhaps due to issues below, or perhaps because *.xlsm data files aren't supported - documentation?), I made it work by having a standard *.xlsx spreadsheet with values linked back to the *.xlsm spreadsheet. But this is bit of pain to manage data consistency; upon a change in the original input data, the *.xlsx needs to be opened & saved before the new data is available to SAM.

2. The documentation needs to be clearer regarding how to identify cells in a spreadsheet with multiple tabs. Even using the standard excel naming conventions for cells [eg '7. Cost database'!Q172], I couldn't get the exchange to work. It did work fine with named cells.

3. I am modelling a HCPV system, and specifically I'm using the excel data to update the cost information. I could not find a data exchange cost variable for Tracking.

4. Once I got the data exchange working, I found that it produced the correct results, but that the SAM Cost input page did not update to show the new values. IMHO this is highly confusing.

Any pointers?

Russell.

Thanks for your help Paul.

Russell

Paul,

How do I run a for loop feeding a batch of weather file names from an Excel exchange sheet to SAM? Is there a way to read in the weather file names one by one (assuming that I have downloaded all the referenced weather files to SAM library) by using an offset function? In VBA it would be coded something like weatherfile = cell(1,1).offset(0,i).value

Thanks,

-Van

Similarly, how do I output the kWh to Excel one by one on different rows and columns. I'm trying to batch run a flat plate PV system using multiple weather files at different tilts and azimuths.

Thanks,

-Van