how to import excel in source?

I want the arrival schedule of source to use a excel sheet.

how to do it?

thanks.

There's a couple of different ways to do this, either using the Single Table Import or the Multiple Table Excel Import (MTEI). The MTEI method uses fewer steps and is in my opinion more straight forward. Here are the steps I would follow:

1) Go to the parameters page of your source and select schedule from the Inter-Arrival style drop down menu. Push the button labeled "Add Table to MTEI" and then click "OK".

2) Click the Excel menu button to bring up the Excel import interface. Click the "edit" button beside the button "Multiple Table Import". That brings up the Automatic import Interface.

It should have one row and 11 columns. The first column will say "NEW" in it so the import knows to open a file browser for you to select what Excel work book you want to import. In the second column you need to input the name of the sheet your table data resides in. The third and fourth columns are for locating the table in the source, and should be properly formatted from pressing the MTEI button in the first step.

The next two columns, Headers and Data Distinction, are important and warrant some explanation. The Headers column must have a number between 0 and 3; 0 means do not import and header information, 1 means import only row headers, 2 means import only column headers, and 3 means import both row and column headers. Chose the correct number based on how you formatted your table.

The data distinction column refers to how the incoming data is interpreted. A value of 0 means no distinction, all data is assumed numeric. A value of 1 means automatic, data distinction is based on the first character in the cell. A value of 2 denotes Row; data is defined by the row above the first row of data in Excel. A value of 3 denotes Column; data is defined by the column before the first column of data in Excel. Automatic is a pretty safe choice unless you've set up your table in a special way.

Further information about the MTEI interface is available in the Users Manual, found under Help in Flexsim.

3) Once you have the MTEI interface configured, click "OK". Now, back at the Excel interface Window (reached by pushing the excel menu button at the top of Flexsim), Click the button marked Multiple Table Import.

4) Chose your Excel workbook from the file browser, and wait for the progress bars to finish.

You should know be able to see your table in the Source Inter-Arrival schedule!

Thanks for letting us know this MTEI option. Never used before since I am used to write code to do it. But I see its potential. It is a good way to organize your import into an EXCEL spreadsheet and import here. And the 0 value option for Num_Rows and Num_Cols are really helpful.

One thing that I could not find the explanation in the help file is the last column, Main_Percent. What is it?

great，thanks

Alan, the column in the MTEI named Main Percent is related to the visual display of the progress bar that is shown during the import process. So if you had two rows (imports) defined in the MTEI table, and the first row represented 30 percent of the total number of imports for both rows, then you would put 30 in row 1, and 70 in row two. By leaving them 0, the main (total) progress bar would grow from 0 to 100 percent during the row 1 import, and then start over again growing from 0 to 100 percent during the row 2 import process.

Hi, I would like to read an excel sheet directly into the schedule of a source, without going through the MTEI or STEI. This is because I have a GUI controlling which input file is selected to be used as the schedule, so I do not know the filename in advance to use in the MTEI or STEI interface.

I seem to be having difficulty figuring out the exact syntax to use for the schedule table when reading the excel information directly into the schedule table. I've tried the following two statements, but it doesn't seem to work (although there are no compiler or run-time errors):

excelimporttable(node("/Source4/variables/schedule",model()),1,1,10,3);
excelimporttable("/Source4/variables/schedule",1,1,10,3);

Can you please tell me what syntax I should be using to indicate the schedule variable as the first argument in the excelimporttable() function?

thanks, Rhonda.

Rhonda,

I guess your problem is that your path in the node command is not correct:
Try to use
node("/Source4>variables/schedule",model())

You should use a “>” sign if you want to dive into the attribute tree of an object.

/ This symbol tells the traversal to go into the current node's sub-tree.
> This symbol tells the traversal to go into a object's attribute tree.

By the way, there is a user concept model which, I think, does what you are looking for:

http://www.flexsim.com/community/for...do=file&id=171