Accessing data stored outside of MC to fill an array

Good day,
I have been struggling with an issue, and wonder if somebody could point me in the right direction. In a nutshell, I would like to load data stored in Excel into an array. This data is not price data, and it would be easier to load the data from an outside source vs. coding it all. I have looked at the Universal Excell DDE, and Ascii mapping, neither of which seem to do this? Or are these things just more robust than that what I was needing, and will easily handle this task?

Thanks any help!

Hi jpartner,

is the Data within Excel static or updating? You could read the data right out of Excel with a DLL, or read it from text files in the first case.
Sending data via DDE from Excel to MC works fine, although I have always used a small program between Excel and MC that made sure that Excel couldn't crash MC with sending too many updates.
One issue with the DDE approach is that you'd have the data as an additional data stream. You would have to use this to fill your array then. Therefore you might prefer the approach with using DLLs or text files.

Regards,
ABC