|
Pertinent information to your drawings
are sometimes contained within an Excel document. This information
can easily be referenced or inserted permanently into your drawing. When an
Excel document is inserted as Excel entities, the spreadsheet
can be re-opened in Excel to edit the contents by
double clicking on the Excel object in your drawing. There are
a few glitches encountered every once and a while with this method.
Placement has to be achieved without any aid of
Osnaps. They just aren't available to use on the Excel
object. This makes it hard to keep the
registration consistent between drawings for
formatting. The registration of the spreadsheet is also unstable if the
total amount of cells are changed. Printing
can be frustrating to say the least with this option also.
The other option for Excel spreadsheets is to insert the information
as AutoCAD (Product) entities. With this option you can insert the
cell borders and the text into your drawing as lines and separate
entries of DTEXT. This also allows the use of Osnaps to acurately place the
entities with other geometry in the drawing. The only
draw back to this method is
that the information will have to be edited
manually using DDEDIT or re-inserted with updated
information from Excel and placed
back into the original position. Compared to all
the problems with linking and embedding Excel
entities, this is the way to go for most users. Follow the steps below
to insert Excel information into your drawing.
Open the Excel spreadsheet and highlight all the cells needed for
your drawing.
Copy these entities to the Windows Clipboard.
Open the target drawing in AutoCAD and issue Edit>Paste
Special.
Choose the Paste option and highlight %PRODUCT Entities.
Choose OK.
Once the information is inserted as AutoCAD entities you can
easily manipulate the objects such as the style
or height via the Properties dialogue box or with
any other typical editing commands.
|
