Wednesday, May 19, 2010

Enable Macro in Excel 2007 for "Export to Excel" functions

Excel 2007 doesn't automatically pop up a window asking user to enable macros. Instead, it silently displays a security warning message right below the tool bar (see the snapshotshot). If you don't notice it, ADEPT may appear to be doing nothing when you run any "Export to Excel" function. You will need to click the "Options..." button in the warning message and a window will pop up for you to enable the macro. Select "Enable this content" and then click OK. The exported spreadsheet will then be generated.

Tuesday, May 4, 2010

Run ADEPT with IDS without setting PATH

IDS installer doesn't set up environment variables such as XILINX and add paths to IDS tools to the PATH environment variable. Instead all IDS tools now execute settings32.bat in the installation directory first to set up the environment before invoking the actual executable. This makes it a lot easier to keep multiple IDS versions on the same machine.

However, ADEPT uses the PATH environment variable to find IDS command line tools. This means that you would have to modify PATH manually to run ADEPT with IDS. To make things easier, ADEPT 0.47.0 now includes a shortcut "adept_ise14.bat" that uses IDS settings32.bat to set up the environment before starting ADEPT. You can just double-click on this shortcut to run ADEPT with IDS. The target of the shortcut (see the snapshot below) is currently set to the default installation path used by IDS installer. If you installed IDS in a different location, please change the path to settings32.bat to match your IDS installation directory. After you made the change, make sure you rename the file so it won't get overwritten if you install a new ADEPT release in the same directory next time.