Hello everyone, this is my first article here. I have gained a lot from The Code Project and it is my time to give something here. What is this article about? It is just about a simple control on Excel so that the position of the arrow in the dashboard will change whenever the value of a cell changes. That means, the control is linked with the cell in Excel. From the figure, you can see that whenever the slider changes its position, the arrow will change its position too. It is because the cell value "A1" is changed by the slider, and so, because my control is linked to the cell, the position of the arrow in my control is changing too. So, don't be confused that my control is linked with the slider. It is indeed linked with the cell "A1". It is not a great article or application. After reading this article, I hope that you will learn the following few things:
How to use GDI+? How to create ActiveX applications using MFC 6.0? How to add properties and link cell to Excel? How to use what we learnt in secondary school mathematics (Geometry, I studied in Hong Kong)? BackgroundWhy there is such an application? I have been a programmer since my university time, and been a professional C++ programmer after graduation. One day, my lovely boss asked me to create a dashboard control in Excel so that users of Excel will always be notified by such a control of how their cell values are changing. Useful or not? For me, I don't think it is useful, but it was a challenge for me. However, for some business, like some resource planning software, data is important, and if there are over hundreds of values, a manager can't just use his eyes to clarify which resources are under critical condition. However, with the help of dashboard, they can be notified easily and they can make decisions right away. This application is just the first step. After I created the application, I started to create a traffic light which needed multi-threading technology to flash users for their greater attention. I will not post the code of the traffic light here, let's see how the reader response to what is here first ;). That is all why there is such a control. I know nothing about ActiveX, Excel programming, COM... etc. I can only find very little resources talking about this on the Internet. So, from the learning phase to the design phase, to the implementation phase, all was stiff work to me and gave me a very hard time. I hope everyone reading this article can be benefited.
How to useExtract the file to some location that you know. Open a command prompt (by choosing "Start"->"Run" and type "cmd" in the pop up dialog ... sorry, I am not treating you guys as fools here ... but there maybe someone you know ... ). In the command prompt, "cd" to the directory that contains the file. Type "regsvr32 <filename>", in this case, type "regsvr32 ActiveXArrow.ocx" to install the ActiveX Control. To show it in Excel, open Excel first. Show the "control toolbars" by clicking on the menu "View"->"Toolbars"->"Control Toolbars". A new toolbar is shown, try to find the "Hammer" like icon on the toolbar and click on it. A list of controls in text format is shown, locate the item named "ActiveXArrow Control" and click on it. Good, you did it. Now, your mouse icon should become a cross rather than an arrow. Try to drag a square on the Excel sheet and a control will be shown. Right click on the control, and in the popup menu, try to choose "Properties". A Properties list box is shown. Try to find the item "LinkedCell" in the list box and type "A1" on its properties. (Remember to push "enter" once you typed it, to activate the changes). On the "Control Toolbars", there is a ruler like icon (always on the top left corner), click on it to finish the design phase (before you are designing). Try to change the value of cell "A1", and see if there are changes to the arrow position of the control. (There should be, otherwise, re-do the process again).In order to uninstall the control, you have to type "regsvr32 /u ActiveXArrow.ocx" in the command prompt described in step 2..
Using the codeBefore talking about the code, I would like to introduce the structure of the whole control first. When you open the project using VC++ 6.0, you will find that there are a lot of classes. For those who are new to ActiveX, it may look strange. In fact, there are only three main classes that implement the main features of the controls. They are "CActiveXArrowCtrl", "CArrowObj", and "CPieForm".
CActiveXArrowCtrl is the main class to handle the drawing of the control. You can find there is a member class function:
void
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