Link Excel cells to Fields

[plawton5092]

Anyone:

This should be straightforward, but I can't find it after two days of searching.

We are a MEP firm, using AutoCAD 2011 and Excel 2007, and our project is a building with 1000+ rooms.  Each room has specified supply and return airflows that need to show up in text in each of the rooms.  All the airflow values are calculated in a spreadsheet.

My thought is to use fields in the text that shows up in each room, then link each field to a specific cell in Excel, because these values will be evolving over the next year.

Is this a wise approach?  If so, what are the steps?  If not, which way would be better?

Thanks to anyone who can help.

[TerryDotson]

AutoCAD has no built in mechanism in fields to link to an Excel cell.  If you were to consider third party software take a look at XL2CAD Pro which has a linkage mechanism.  If you need additional automation we can add it.

[plawton5092 · Accepted solution]

Thanks Terry.  However, the firms i've worked for have tended to be penny-wise and pound-foolish - unable to bring themselves to spend even $100 on a software solution that would easily pay for itself in the first week.  On their behalf, i apologize.

In other news, however, I did find that Tables will link to Excel ranges, and after a bit of fiddling around with formatting, that seems to work well:

http://docs.autodesk.com/BLDSYS/2011/ENU/filesAUG/WS73099cc142f4875556e08710d8a047f44-7fe6.htm

It remains very manual on the initial set-up, but it can be a big timesaver as the values in Excel evolve 5 or 10 times during the 2-year design process.

Thanks again