Read the "How to file"

Read the How to file: How to: A loop diagram is a type of schematic that shows the wiring all the way from terminals on one device through various cables and junction boxes to the terminals of another device. Typically this is some kind of field sensor/instrument to a PLC or IO card. However, it can be for anything as this is a common representation. They usually look something like this with terminal numbers in the boxes, lines between the terminals showing the wiring/cabling. Basically I’d like you to make something that takes a spreadsheet listing of lots of cabling/wiring as input and outputs a sort of end to end connection diagram (or spreadsheet) of the connections between a given pair of devices as output. I think the easiest way is probably to make this in excel using macros, but you can do it in something else if you can figure out how. I have a specific list of fibre optic connections from another project that you can use to develop this. Attached is a spreadsheet ‘fibre list’ tab of thousands of connections (filtered by ‘service’ to just show one) This list particular list is actually a list of each end (FOBOT/Port) of the fibre optic cables. Each cable has 2 ends. Then the other ‘end’ or direction of the same cable - On the right side are some linking patches (like panel wiring) that connects these ports/terminals to ports/terminals of another cable or device. The result is that with these 8 rows, the connection all the way from one device to another is represented. However, due to the repeated rows per cable, this is clearly kind of difficult to read, particularly for technicians in the field. This information can be shown as a loop diagram, which is much clearer and easier to understand and trace through. I have manually made an example in the “example” tab of how such a loop diagram of that service could look like. Here you can see how it starts at the device ASP21101A port G2, follows a patch to a port at ‘node 1’, cable to ‘node 2’, patch to ‘node 3’ etc. all the way to the Finish device ASP21103A. This full link has 4 intermediate nodes. However, some links may only have 1 or 8+. To start with I think you can assume the maximum is 8. A simplification of the above diagram format would be to keep the FOBOT & Port number together in one cell. My approach would be: 1. Create a helper sheet with lookups to trace the link through first as the rows in the full listing likely will not be in order of the link direction. (I can show you an example of this I have made something before) 2. Then use a ‘loop drawing’ template sheet with the format and formulas or macro to copy the information in. 3. Macro to export the ‘drawing’ to pdf Attached is a list of the link nodes in order. (Fibre Linked List) You can instead use this as the input and it should be much much easier. Basically you will just need a macro to step through this list, copying relevant cells to the loop drawing template, printing it as pdf, then going to the next service. You can write this to do a single one first, then to do multiple.