autoupdating dde links based on modifiable cells

[Ntommyb]

Ok I'm a complete noob, I've cannibalized my fair share of other people's code in my time though to make my life easier. I have to say I love playing with excel and vba. I'm a controls engineer for the automotive industry so really I deal with a different kind of code completely. A couple years ago I found out you can link through the dde to Rslogix and I've been playing with it ever since.

I made a cycle timer a long time ago that I found just wasn't versatile enough for what I wanted so I tried to mess around with it to make it auto update and change dde links based on configurable cell values. That I found really hard to do just using the & because it just doesn't like it.

Basiclly what I'm trying to do is put together a link that looks like this

=(RSLINX|MF11!'_020S01_Cycle_History[1],L1,C1')

That will get me to the data I want to display. That works fine but I want to be able to assign "MF11" to be whatever I have in another cell. I also want to be able to assign the 20 out of _020S01 from a drop down menu. It all works fine and good when I use the & but I have to do a =("=(RSLINX|&a1&!'_0&a2 etc etc kind of thing and it doesn't want to link that way for some reason. It displays exactly how I want it to but it doesn't link and display the value like it would if I just type the raw string.

Ok so I get to playing around because I'm a presistant little bugger and I find that I can write that same code in VBA and populate a textbox with it using

Private Sub TextBox2_Change()

TextBox2.Text = "=(RSLINX|" _
& Range("CycleTime!H24") _
& "!'" _
& "_0" _
& Range("CycleTime!H26") _
& "_OC01.oCurrentCycleAcc" _
& ",L1,C1')"

Me.Range("CycleTime!C5").Value = TextBox2.Value

End Sub

Then I used the last line to populate a cell based on the value in the text box and it links the cell fine but the textbox shows the raw text lol.

Ok it's kind of confusing but I'm a self pronounced noob, all I really want to do is make a large cycletime spread sheet that I can take to a machine and type in the topic (MF11) and the station number (20) into cells on the worksheet and have it update alot of other cells right away. I don't really want to use textboxes but I will if I have to. I'd like to just write vba code that populates it dynamiclly.

Please help a noob

 

[Ntommyb]

omg it made a mess out of my post

I guess you have to allow this page to script or it just looks like garbage lol

 

[Ntommyb]

Me.Range("CycleTime!C5").Value = "=(RSLINX|" _
& Range("CycleTime!H24") _
& "!'" _
& "_0" _
& Range("CycleTime!H26") _
& "_OC01.oCurrentCycleAcc" _
& ",L1,C1')"

This works just fine if I put a button to activate it, took me a while to figure it out, could've used some help. Maybe this will help other people.

My newest problem is, I don't want to have to configure a topic on my current machine if its already configured on a remote machine I'm getting data for. Is there a way to link to another machine using like a //computer name/{RSLINX|topicname! data,L1,C1} type method?