Topic: CAD/Excel compatability

[Pasquale]

my office has been doing door/window schedules the old fashioned way of creating them in Excel and copy/pasting the necessary cells into the CAD paperspace file. (I know CAD can handle schedules without excel, but I don't know how to do it, and neither does anyone else here).

The problem is when we go to plot PDFs of the paperspaces with Excel files pasted in, the computer goes balistic, runs out of memory, then shuts down. Is there a good process for importing Excel cells into paperspace (or modelspace) for easier plotting? Or is there a setting somewhere which might reduce how much CAD *thinks* about plotting the cells? Does anyone think it's easier just to learn how to do tables in CAD?

thanks for the help.
-p

(PS. we're using both 2002 and ADT3.3... both programs flip out with excel files pasted in)

[ELOQUINTET]

well depending on what version of cad you are running you could use paste special and paste as autocad entities or use tables and eliminate excel all together. we do huge schedules here which involve some formulas and i have found that tables are up to speed in the formulas depatment quite yet but with each release its been improving. we paste excel into paperspace currently with no problems. i'm no expert on the memory issues maybe someone else could suggest something

[deegeecees]

Waiting for Murphy, but try this... ...or you could do a search locally here at the Swamp and you'll get quite a few matches for "excel".

Warning: I just tested the link and there is a pop-up. Whats up with that Murph?

[PHX cadie]

Just a thought after reading this again......
Is Excel the culprit or Adobe?
I've seen pdf's slow a plotter way down, but I don't think it effected the CPU

[ELOQUINTET]

yeah i tried murphs thing but our schedules are not standard enough to be able to setup templates. i don't know it just never caught on here

[PHX cadie]

yeah i tried murphs thing but our schedules are not standard enough to be able to setup templates. i don't know it just never caught on here

So you think Excel is chewing up the memory?

[Murphy]

DGC-
Sorry about the popup. Must be an angelfire thing. That's what you get when you do free website hosting.
Eloquintet-
You don't need standard schedule to set up templates. I have one template setup for all of our schedules.

On the OLE thing, we tried it for a week and Excel had to open for every schedule on a drawing.
So, when we had 12 schedules on one drawing in would open XL, update one OLE, close XL, open XL, update, close, etc.

Just tinker with the settings in AutosXeduLe until you get the desired results.
By the way, jjs is looking into the current code to make it quicker and easier.
I will let you know when there is an update.

[ELOQUINTET]

yeah i'm keeping it filed away in the back of my mind murph but at the moment i don't have time to set it all up to my liking and then explain how it works to others. it's hard to sell it to others who have been just pasting them in for years and don't have a problem doing so. sooner or later i will try to sell them on it but only after i fully understand it and set everything up.

[Dnereb]

If I understand the problem correctly.
You don,t need automatic update of the data copied from Excel.
An option is to open the excel files from within Acad and let the user select the desired data.
reading this in an placing it as Mtext or Text at a given place with VBA or in a specified box although that's slightly complexer.
I'm sure jjs is capable of this. and it would prevent large overhead additions to your drawing.

[MickD]

Another thing to watch for when doing pdf conversions is fonts, if the pdf driver has trouble recognising the fonts it could hang your printer forever. Try changing the font to something common (like courier/new) and see if that helps.
Cheers,
Mick.

[Murphy]

Something else you might want to look at is in the Options for OLE. There is a checkbox in there that reads something like "Use originating application for OLE objects".
Try unchecking that (if it is checked) and doing a PDF.
If it is not already checked, try checking it.