TechIdiots Forum

I previously used NetStumbler and somewhere found an Excel spreadsheet with an imbedded VB script. This spreadsheet allowed me to do site surveys by walking to test locations, triggering the script a few times to create an average sample and recording date and time stamps. Once done with each test location, I pressed the “Run Report” button and it correlated these time stamps to the correct row in the NetStumbler exported database and disregarded the other data. The resulting summary report would show every AP MAC address and its RF channel across the top row and its signal strength below it for each test location. It also added colors gray to red in the signal cell so you can quickly see about 7 ranges of signal without focusing on the numbers. From this simple report, you can quickly see channel overlap, db separation, strength, rogue APs and non-responders. Being new to Vistumbler, I saw the similarity to NetStumbler and hoped this report generator would still work but the VB script has a problem with the different number of columns. I was wondering if anyone in the forum has seen this type of VB script for Vistumbler and could point me to the download location. I will also upload the reporting spreadsheet. It contains the report generator, the raw NetStumbler data and the summary report for 14 samples that where triggered at 1 physical location. If someone is clever enough to fix the column issue in VB, this would be helpful for anyone that does a site survey to troubleshoot AP problems.

I updated your file to work with Vistumbler. I had to change it to the new office format (Excel .xlsm) to support the size of the vistumbler csv files. I also had to change the signal value to use RSSI since i did not format my signal the same way as netstumbler. This macro should work with the current v10.5 detailed csv file.

The only thing I was unsure of was the signal to color. I considered a low signal the grey color and orange the high color. did I get this backwards?

Attached is the updated excel file and the test detailed csv I used. let me know if this does what you wanted.

Hi Andrew.
I ran into a few problems when I tried to use the survey tool you modified. I saw the same results shown below on these 3 different PC's...
Win7 64-bit SP1 - Office 2010
Win7 64-bit SP1 - Office 2013
XP 32-bit SP3 - Office 2003 (incompatible)

(1) When I "Run Report" with your data, it chugs along then produces 2 additional spreadsheet tabs as it should but the "Signal Strength" sheet only lists 35 MAC addresses in cells B1 thru AK1. There is no signal data in the report.

(2) I tried to run my own test with the sheet and when I press Ctrl-Shift-A in cell A1, nothing is written to cell A1 and A2; I just hear a DING...

You have it right about the colors the original author used. There could be more but the way I see it, the colors (low strength to high) are gray, white, light yellow, dark yellow, light orange, dark orange.

Thanks so much for taking time to look at this reporting tool. Can you take that hammer of yours and give it a few more taps?

hmm, I didn't touch the macro that handles ctrl-shift-A, but your right it doesn't seem to be working.

I did retest the file I posted and it seems to get the signal. If you aren't it may be because you are specifying the wrong time offset. To match the file I uploaded you would have to use "-4" for a time offset.

Give this version a try

Your v2 version did the trick with Ctrl-Shift-A not working!
The -4 was the problem because I selected the wrong offset and could not see the data. Thanks

One thing I was wrong about in my origianl feature description was the ability for the report to automatically display the channel under the MAC address. I looked at my past surveys and I must have added that manually. I hate to look a gift horse in the mouth but is this something that is easy to add to row 2? No big deal if it is and I appreciate all you have done.

Putting channel in the header seems like it would be a pain the way the macro works. I can include channel with the signal easily though. See if the attached version will work for you

I tested version 3 and it achieves all the design goals. My hat is off to you Andrew for fixing this and making an improvement too. I hope it continues to operate in future versions of Vistumbler and others find it as useful as I do.