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For example:
- You are monitoring process control data coming in from your plant and you want to compare with PIPE-FLO's calculated results to see if maintenance needs to occur.
- You want to run cost calculations for your entire lineup over the course of a year to show savings and justify the capital cost of new equipment.
- You are designing a new system and want to use the brake horse power from your pumps in various lineups to select appropriate motors using your company's Excel based selection tool.
- You have a large pump purchase order and want to compare it with your system to ensure you have named everything appropriately.
Using X-Link to pull data from PIPE-FLO® into Microsoft® Excel®
Additional Notes:
- Open PIPE-FLO to a system where you wish to pull data from.
- Open up an Excel worksheet. You'll notice you now have some additional options on your toolbar which look like this:
If you don't see these buttons within Excel, right click on the toolbar area and check Pipe-flo Toolbar - Pick a cell on the spreadsheet where you wish the first value to be.
- Select the Fill column with data from PIPE-FLO button which looks like this:
- In the List items box, select the items you wish to pull from, let's say you just want pump data, select Pumps from the list.
- For now, we'll leave the Query Code as the default design.name You'll see this is a correct code because the box below reads "Known Code" and it is green. For a complete list of the Query Codes, you can click on the help button shown below, then select Function Codes from the list on the left.
- Hit OK. You'll now see all your pump names listed in Excel.
- Now we'll put the pump's BHP in the next column. This is done the same way as the design data was imported in step 7 except our Query Code is calc.PumpPower Don't forget to select Pumps from the drop down list. Notice the box below switches from red to green once the recognized code is inputted. Since this is a calculated value, PIPE-FLO automatically switches to calculate mode when a calc value is read into Excel.
- Notice that when you click on one of the cells in Excel, the formula looks something like this: =pfeQuery("WCP{001}","calc.pumppower"). This means the formula is still linked with PIPE-FLO and can be updated.
- Now, if you want to calculate the cost of that pump given a motor efficiency of 97% and a power cost of $0.07 per kWh, you can easily create the formula in the next cell which multiplies the pump power cell you just imported by 0.97*0.07.
- Next, go back into PIPE-FLO and close one of the pumps.
- In Excel, select the Refresh button which looks like this:
Notice that the closed pipeline's TDH has changed to a blank to reflect the closed pipeline. It is important to note that this refresh will also occur whenever your Excel spreadsheet is opened when PIPE-FLO is running, so you'll want to decide whether to have the cells linked to PIPE-FLO or not. - Now let's assume you want to remove the link to PIPE-FLO, but keep the numbers the same in the spreadsheet. You can do this by copying the column in Excel and then pasting it using the Paste Special command in the Edit menu. Select the Values radio button. If you see a yellow warning sign next to it, click on it and select Convert to Number. Now these numbers are no longer connected to PIPE-FLO and will not update when opening Excel or when hitting the Read data from PIPE-FLO into controls button.
Additional Notes:
- There are many different Query Codes available to pull from PIPE-FLO. The complete list can be found by clicking on the yellow question mark on the Excel tool bar next to the other PIPE-FLO buttons, then select the Function Codes on the left for a list and description of all the codes available.
- Any components with a quotation in them will not import/export with the Excel macro functions. For example, LWM-3"pipe will not import/export into Excel.
- It's important to note that when an item name is changed in PIPE-FLO, it will not update in Excel as shown in step 13. This is because you are querying PIPE-FLO for a name which no longer exists (because you just renamed it). To get a new list of the names, you'll need to re-import them as you did in steps 4 - 7.
- When importing items from Excel back into PIPE-FLO, you should save the PIPE-FLO system after the import. The system will not prompt you to save the imported data if you close PIPE-FLO.
- There are some additional considerations for our International customers. Please see the Related KB article noted below.
