Graphics

I'm putting together a package for a football event

Can be up to three matches (6 teams) per day

I am using Excel as the data source for team infomation

Currently I have one Excel file with two sheets - (one per team)

First question - do I have to duplicate the team scene in XPression to look at the different sheets

Then what should I do for the second and third game ?

It seems a waste to have 6 identical scenes (except for the data linq pointer) and three DataLinq sources

Is there some clever trick with datalinq keys ??

Or is it usual to rename Excel files between games ??

If anyone is doing something similar - I would be greatful for any advice !!

Thanks

Joe

I would only put one game per excel file and then just change the datalinq configuration between games to point to a different excel file (or rename the file on disk instead).

#XPression

To further expand.. What I've seen many places do is set up two datalinqs in the server, one for the home team, and one for the away team. Build the graphics to access each of these datalinq sources. Each team should be in it's own XLS file. Then for each game, you can just point the Home team datalinq to the correct XLS for the home team, and the Away team datalinq to the correct XLS for the away team.

#XPression

Thanks for that

Would you have any concerns about having six datalinqs - 3 games x 2 teams

This is a lot of similar but diiferent datalinq scenes but would allow someone not too familiar with XPression to prep and test in advance

Also have noticed when taking my scene to air the data on player 1 is sometimes slow to update

This is quite noticable where I have photos of players

Any ideas ??

And finally is there any issues with the newer XLSX excel files ?

Joe

#XPression

Shouldn't be any problem with six datalinqs..

If you are using the ADODB datalinq to connect to excel sheets, when you are configuring the datalinq go to the third tab "Advanced" and choose "database supports TOP clause (Excel)". This can speed up the datalinq queries from excel significantly. (especially when you define an entire column in the excel sheet as a named range).

Also, since the photos get loaded in realtime when you access them, make sure you aren't using super high resolution photos but use reasonably sized jpgs or pngs..

#XPression

The Advanced tab in config seems to make a huge difference - database supports TOP clause (Excel)

I only get a flash of 'preparing' whereas before it took a second or two to load data

The photos seem to be ok (250 KB png) stored locally

I'm going to change to xlsx files

Thanks again for quick reply

Joe

#XPression

The other thing that can cause a one to two second delay is not having the workbook in excel set to "shared". You'll find this on the Ribbon bar in excel on the "Review" page. Choose "share workbook".

It sounds like you must already have this set correctly, but for anyone else reading this thread it's critical.

#XPression