Hello all,
I just began messing around with linking excel and autocad (disappointed that you can't link to .xlsm but that will go on the wish list). I was wondering if there was already a post as to how to not lose your fields when you download from source. I have a table that has fields from my sheet set with drawing names etc...but everytime I click download from source it converts the field to plain text. Any work arounds?
Solved! Go to Solution.
Solved by MikeEvansUK. Go to Solution.
Abandon ship...
I haven't had a whole lot of luck with Excel to Civil 3D / AutoCAD. I've dropped Excel sheets directly into AutoCAD and updated the Excel file with a right-click update OLE (I think it's an OLE). There are options to insert Excel files differently. I've done this successfully. I try to stay away from AutoCADs tables, and linking these to excel seems like a little over ambitious, IMO.
Can you describe in more detail what you are doing, i.e breadth of data exchange. What is coming from SSM that needs to be tied to Excel?
I am mainly getting and entering data from acad and migrating to excel. The data in the acad table is being populated from SSM (Drawing Name, Description, Rev No/date). On the excel side I am just using the acad data to populate what statistics I need. As users update the sheet set (New numbering/descriptions/revs) and I write the new data to the source file a message pops up saying I need to update the data link. While the excel sheet does update with the new data, updating converts the field in acad to plain text. Hope this answers your question.
I was going to head where Mike went with multiple tables, but I would first explore adding custome fields to SSM for the users to edit and create the SSM list with the custom fieldsand have one cohesive package.
So just to follow up on this...I have two tables. The first table is the acad table and contains fields that get whatever information I need from acad be it from SSM or w/e. The second table is the data linked table and some columns are linked by formulas to the acad table. Here is how it looks in acad (sorry if this pic comes in terrible):
These are the settings I have used for the data linked table:
These settings allow me to either accept whats in excel (plain text) or keep the formatting that I have in acad (formulas linked to the acad table) when the excel file is updated and saved:
Everything is working the way I want it to accept that I cannot not link the two material columns by way of a formula. It just comes up as ####. Any suggestions?
RC the table>>> data format and make sure it is a number type