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What is Measure?

National Instruments Measure is a set of Microsoft Excel add-ins for direct data acquisition and instrument control. With Measure and Microsoft Excel (95, 97, or 2000) you can quickly configure and take measurements with National Instruments data acquisition hardware, GPIB-connected instruments and serial (RS-232)-connected instruments.

Control any serial (RS-232) or GPIB instrument

With Measure, you quickly configure benchtop instrument experiments or laboratory measurement operations using intuitive popup dialog boxes. An Instrument Setup dialog box guides you through configuration of the communication parameters for each of your instruments. For GPIB, Measure automatically finds all of the instruments on the GPIB bus. For serial, you enter the instrument name on the COM port, baud rate, parity, stop, and data bit specifications for communicating with your instrument.

Simplify DAQ operations from Excel

Acquire or generate analog signals from Excel with ease using a wide variety of National Instruments DAQ products. Measure automatically locates any National Instruments DAQ products configured in your computer. Simply select a device and specify the parameters for analog I/O operations using Task Configuration dialog boxes. Measure supports all multifunction DAQ hardware from National Instruments

Directly input acquired data into spreadsheet cells - No parsing or converting data required

Measure eliminates the need for custom programming or manual data entry by automatically placing measurements into worksheet cells. After you configure the communications parameters for your data acquisition hardware or instrument, you next set up custom Measurement Tasks. Each Measurement Task instructs the instrument or data acquisition hardware to perform a particular function and perhaps return a result to one or more worksheet cells. The list below shows some example tasks.

Example Measurement Tasks

  • Acquire a mass measurement from a serial-port connected balance and put the result in worksheet cell A1.

  • Send a command to a GPIB-connected power supply to output 5 volts.

  • Trigger acquisition of 500 points at 2k samples/sec from channel 0 of a National Instruments E-series data acquisition board. Put the resulting 500 points into the Excel cell range A1:A500.

Automate your Measure I/O operations using Visual Basic for Applications (VBA), the standard Excel macro language

You can easily invoke Measurement Tasks from the Excel menu or by calling them from VBA. Measure also includes an automated utility that converts Measurement Tasks into VBA code modules. It surveys the tasks you have configured in your workbook and creates user interfaces (on VBA forms) and VBA code to mimic the behavior of the Measure tasks. The converter stores code modules in your workbook, and after the conversion, each of the new tasks is available as a macro, which you run from the Macros dialog box.