Cad to excel

[stevsmith]

I dont understand this, what benefits does cad to excell have?

I've never really had to do this type of thing.

What do you use it on? Data tables? Blocks?

I dont kno, can someone explain, It may benefit me in the future if I can understand what to use it on.

 

 

Sorry for asking such a silly question, lol

[CmdrDuh]

Depends on what your trying to do. I take all of my titleblock information that I want to store and push it to excel in the form of a project log. My engineer then can see every drawings title, revision, sheet number, etc. Should the engineer need to "renumber" the sheets, I can make changes in the excel sheet, and push that info back to cad.

 

I also make tables in excel faster than in acad, but import the excel into acad tables.

[CAD-LOVER0208]

I never knew that we can import stuff from cad to excel or vise versa

[rustysilo]

Using an attribute extraction template you can also compose schedules, bom's, etc. in excel.

[rustysilo]

Furthermore, in the civil field if you need to extract topo point data for analysis or just to send to a surveyor or other engineering firm you can export points to a format you can open in excel. It can be more efficient to send a point file as opposed to a cad dwg via email where a dwg is not needed.

 

Really though, there are many possibilities and uses for extracting information from autocad and making it available for excel. I would think that this is used mostly in manufacturing and architectural for bom's and such.

[ReMark]

In AutoCAD 2008 and later, the AutoCAD/Excel link is bi-directional. Info changed in one program will be reflected in the other.

 

Parametric based design can benefit from this type of arrangement.

 

We "dump" attributes of all our instrumention from P&IDs from AutoCAD into an Excel spreadsheet to cross-check for duplicate equipment numbers.

[Nick_101]

Hi Steve . . . .

 

Going over some old posts looking for stuff on the 'Cad to Excel' issues and I came across your query.

 

Here's what I'm trying to achieve with this possibility:

 

We do a lot of shopping centres. From our layout drawings we produce a table of shop no's, Tenant names, and shop areas. All shops start out as 'VACANT' and slowly get populated as the project goes on!

Also, the shop sizes change, or two shops get combined into one, and so on and the shop number change too!

I have written a routine (with the help of people of this forum like Lee Mac and ASMI) that allows me to pick a series of polylines to generate my table in AutoCAD and then manage the changes to the information above

Once this table is into Excel, the letting agent uses columns for his rental calcs and a person we call the Tenant Co-Ordinator uses columns to manage the tenants installation programme, signage, completion dates etc. We started posting this excel spreadsheet at 'Google Docs' so that everyone had immediate access to it on-line and we each looked after our own columns . . . . and saved a lot of time not having to re-input new info and yes it gets messy sometimes! and of course the project always wants to see what's what . . . .Ouch!

 

I'd really like to perfect the link between cad and excel because of the above!

 

If you want I'll post my routine for you to see! . . . .

 

Cheers