How to export machine data from PLCs and HMIs to Excel in X4 Remote
To process and analyse data, many people prefer to use Excel. In this short tutorial, we’ll show you how to export machine data from PLC & HMIs to Excel in just four simple steps using X4 Remote and X4 Cloud.
Many people, including engineers and machine operators, are familiar with Excel, which becomes the go-to tool for analysing data. This is also true for machine users looking for a record of performance or engineers searching for data trends.
Lenze.Digital provides you with all the tools needed to remotely connect to machines and industrial installations and to collect data from equipment, such as PLCs, HMIs, IPCs, servo drives, frequency regulators and much more. The only requirement is that this equipment is accessible via Ethernet and supports data access via one of our supported protocols.
The collected data is stored in X4 Cloud, where it can be visualised in dashboards for a wide range of applications such as performance monitoring, quality assurance or even machine learning. From X4 Cloud you can easily download data to Excel for your personalised evaluations. For more advanced scenarios, data can be exported to third party software or cloud platforms.
Step 1. Connect your PLC to X4 Remote
X4 Remote gathers data from industrial devices, timestamps it and stores the data to X4 Cloud in a time-series database. To access your data in X4 Cloud, you just need to create a free X4 Remote account and connect your machines to our cloud environment via the x500 router. The set-up process is described in detail on our support portal.
Please check out our step-by-step instructions or introduction video for further instructions.
Step 2. Activate Cloud Data Logging
With your equipment now connected to X4 Cloud, you need to activate data logging to start collecting machine data. Sources can be PLCs, HMIs, IPCs or other industrial devices, as long as they speak one of our supported protocols. You can activate and configure cloud data logging in your account settings. For details, please refer to the step-by-step guide on our support portal. In X4 cloud historical data can be represented in many ways, e.g by using the table widget. You can get a quick impression by watching this video.
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Step 3. Create versatile dashboards
Once your data is being acquired, you can set up machine dashboards with widgets providing real time status or performance information. This helps you to easily keep an eye on temperature, weight or other metrics that are important for your process or workflow.
In the same machine dashboards you can also track data history. Using data stored in these widgets, you can quickly find out what happened previously. In order to analyse data from a specific time frame, you can export it to Excel.
Step 4. Export your PLC data to Excel
To export data to Excel, open the dashboard of your choice, select the time frame you want to analyse in the upper right corner and click on the download-icon in the upper right corner of your dashboard widget. Select “Export to CSV-file” to start the download. Now you can open or import the downloaded CSV-file in any spreadsheet software, such as Microsoft Excel, LibreOffice Calc – or use a cloud suite like Google Sheets. In some software it may be necessary to define the file’s format as comma separated (csv) with the US-English character set ISO-8859-1. Now that you have all the required data at your disposal, you can perform any analysis.
Not using X4 Cloud Data Logging yet?
X4 Cloud Data Logging is an additional bookable feature within X4 Remote. Feel free to contact our sales team to get a free trial access to X4 Cloud Data Logging to find out if it fits all your needs.
