The ability to do “massconfiguration” is a unique and powerful tool in WinCC OA. Most people use the MaPara addin for Excel and that works great.
Many times, the ASCII manager panel can be just a useful to export all the descriptions and/or alarm text for a complete class of data point. This type of edit ensures consistency in the alarm messages. Using the ASCII Manager wizard panel is great and can do the types of exports that the MaPara cannot.
The ASCII manager panel has buttons for a simple text editor and for Excel (on Windows development environments). The text editor is very limited as the tab-separated format of the exports makes lining up the data very difficult. The Excel will view the columns nicely, but if you are not extremely careful, you can destroy the LangStrings due to the way Excel interprets the text.
For years, I searched for a way to simply edit these files without Excel. I finally stumbled onto the solution: Nodepad++ with a special plugin. It is this plugin that fixes the way the tab stops are displayed that is the magic.
Download Notepad++ from https://notepad-plus-plus.org/
Once inside Notepad++, you will want to use the Plugin Admin (I hope you installed that option, if not, install again and choose it). From the Plugins Admin page, search for “elastic” and you will find ElasticTabstops. Choose this plugin and install it. You will need to stop and restart Notepad++ to get the plugin to work.
Now you can open a .dpl or .ascii file from WinCC OA using Notepad++ and see the ascii file perfectly aligned and easy to edit.
If you want to add a button to the ASCII Manager panel, open the panels/vision/AsciiMan.pnl. Copy the cmdNotepad button for your new Notepad++ button. Edit the ClickEvent and replace the fileEdit function call with this system call:
system("cmd /c C:/Progra~1/Notepad++/notepad++.exe " + datei);
Of course, this script is unique to Windows development environments. Linux users can find out more about using Notepad++ from their website. I am not sure if the ElasticTabstops plugin is available for Linux.