How to change or replace text on autocad drawing using excel spreadsheet

Hi There,

I hope i have the right Forum Area, if not i do apologise.....

I will try to keep this brief and to the point,

I curently use AutoCAD Mechanical 2015, our drawings have a large number of text entries used to identify items on the drawing. When we create the drawing we give them generic names, we then send them out to the client and then return the drawing with an Excel list with their new identities.

We then have to sit and manually change the text entries on the drawings to the neew descriptions supplied by the client, as you can imagine this is a long and tedious waste of time.

Is there a way of copying the new text entries into the drawing using the Excel spreadsheet? the spreadsheet has both the original text entry and the new entry in columns.

Ideally something similar to the find and replace function.....

Any thoughts, tips, ideas and sugestions would be greatly appreciated.

Many Thanks

Simon

Is the text in the form of an attribute?

Hi ReMark,

No, it is just text for now, but can become an attribute if that would help.....

This kind of thing takes forethought and planning. I've not done this but I believe AutoCAD can do what you are asking. The text needs to be attributes and they need to be exported to an Excel spread sheet. The values can then be changed in the spread sheet and then imported back to the attributes.

You could try using a custom lisp routine that would export the text to an Excel spreadsheet. One such program can be found at the Cadalyst magazine website by clicking on the link below. I have not tested the routine. There are other similar routines available.

http://cadtips.cadalyst.com/export/export-text-a-drawing-excel-spreadsheet

ReMark, my take on that routine is it creates an Excel spread sheet from a table in AutoCAD that has been made with lines and text. The OP wants to get the Excel data into AutoCAD.

If that's the case then there is this one from CADStudio called Click2XLS.vlx and Text2XLS (freeware). Export individually picked text from AutoCAD to Excel. Find it here...http://www.cadstudio.cz/freeware

Then there is always the old AutoCAD standby DATAEXTRACTION.

Is there a way of copying the new text entries into the drawing using the Excel spreadsheet? the spreadsheet has both the original text entry and the new entry in columns.

ReMark, I'm not trying to be a PITA, but it sounds like you are misunderstanding the OP. He needs to get the data from Excel into AutoCAD.

Via DataLink?

That was my first thought, but that, again, is for tables which can be a two way street. In order for AutoCAD to generate a tables from entities within AutoCAD, I believe they have to be attributes.

For the OPs particular situation, I thought there was something other than DATALINK which would do the same thing, skipping the table within AutoCAD part.

Lets stop guessing guys, Simonc post a dwg with a before and after and the excel then we can understand properly, I am reading it as a FIND TEXT and REPLACE which can be done simply. A bit of excel, maybe a script.

Wow, thanks for all the feedback and response, i must apologise for not replying sooner.....

Unfortunately due to the T's and C's at work i cant post any drawings.... sorry .... here is a little more detail, as mentioned we use AutoCAD Mech 2015, our drawings represent system interconnection drawings whereby we have up to 20 interfaces (cables) from drawing to drawing, when we create a system set each drawing has up to 20 cables on the drawing we number them from 1 to 20.

we send the drawings to the client who then applies his own cable numbering and we then have to replace the 1 to 20 cable numbers with bespoke client cable numbers.

As it stands now we spend ages editing the cable number text on each drawing and i was wondering if there was a way of speeding the process up by exporting all the cable numbers 1-20 to Excel and then importing the client modifired numbers back into AutoCAD. (preferably all numbers to be swapped at the same time rather than individually).

I did read that you can import and export Attributes but dont know if it works for multiple attributes in one go or if it is individual.

Many Thanks

Simon

@ReMark,

Thank You for the links, i will have a look at the during lunch today...... Much Appreciated.....

http://www.cad-notes.com/linking-excel-external-data-to-autocad-data-extraction/

This how to do it with a datalink. In short, you would have to set up blocks with attributes and create a table from the initial values. Send that table with your drawings for the client to fill it out. The same table can be applied to multiple .dwg files.

The attached files show an example with just 4 numbers, select all the cells colored yellow in the excel file and copy them to the clipboard (Ctrl+C)

In the Autocad drawing, make the command line active by actually clicking into the command line, and paste the contents from the clipboard (Ctrl+V), this uses attributed blocks and the name of the blocks and attribute tags is linked to the names used in the excel file, but you can change those to suit youself.

Labels.dwg

Change Attributes.xlsx

If attributed blocks were used in the drawing then the OP could utilize two Express Tools commands: Export Attribute Information and Import Attribute Information. The commands are found under Express Tools > Blocks.

The attached files show an example with just 4 numbers, select all the cells colored yellow in the excel file and copy them to the clipboard (Ctrl+C)

In the Autocad drawing, make the command line active by actually clicking into the command line, and paste the contents from the clipboard (Ctrl+V), this uses attributed blocks and the name of the blocks and attribute tags is linked to the names used in the excel file, but you can change those to suit youself.

You may have to "disguise" your excel file by changing the extension. I cannot download the file and I'm sure it is because it is an Excel file. Not sure if that is CADTutor or our security that is blocking it but it is common for those files to be blocked.

You may have to "disguise" your excel file by changing the extension. I cannot download the file and I'm sure it is because it is an Excel file. Not sure if that is CADTutor or our security that is blocking it but it is common for those files to be blocked.

I can download it, so it's not being blocked by Cadtutor. Must be your security that's doing it.

ReMark

The OP mentioned about changing his methods to work with attributes, so this was just to show a method using that.

RobDraw

I did nothing more than select and post the excel file as normal, it actually shows up and downloads just fine for me, it could be a browser issue. I do remeber excel files giving problems in the past but it didn't show any signs of that maybe as an older version will work

Change Attributes.xls

Oops, my bad. I was clicking on the icon. When I click on the link, I can download it. Funny how that works