OPC or SOAP

Hello All-

I am using a Siemens MP370 and I need to connect to an Excel spread sheet on a remote computer and I am having difficulty.

I have never used SOAP or OPC before, and I am a bit confused with the examples that Siemens provides. I can make the SOAP version work but the OPC version is still nebulous to me.

What I need to do is poke the spread sheet with a value which is in the Excel function vlookup and read the result of vlookup back to the MP370. With the SOAP example that Siemens provided I can only poke from the spread sheet into the MP370.

Does anybody know of some examples of setting up OPC and SOAP functionality on Multipanels?

I have used OPC many times, I did once use a third party OPC server on a remote PC from the multipanel across a wireless ethernet connection, it worked fine. I was able to get data from 3 separate multi-panels with it. I used it with Wonderwares OPC server. I am sure Simatic's OPC server would work the same, but it would probably have to reside on a remote PC as I don't think the OS of the multipanel will support it.