Linking data from CAD table to Excel sheet

[Ryan.Adams76SPW]

Hi all,

I know this question has been asked a bunch, but I have yet to find a solution.

So, I'm wondering if you can link data from CAD into an Excel sheet, rather than the other way around. The firm I am working for has a very tedious way of measuring and calculating the area of a project's site as well as the building envelope and any/every room within the building. As of now, my firm has us tracing everything that needs to be calculated with a polyline, and then linking that polyline with a text that uses the field command to calculate the sq footage. Then, we need to input every single area calculation into an excel sheet one by one, which because very annoying when there are 90+ rooms that needs to be accounted for in just a single project.

Anyways, I took it upon myself to attempt to overhaul this system in my free time and I'm fairly new to using tables and such in CAD (despite having been using CAD for 7+ yrs now lol). I know you can link data from an Excel file into a CAD drawing, but is there any way you can link the data from a table in CAD (I've arranged the all the room area calculations into a single table) into an excel sheet? If this is possible, this will cut down the time to do this task by at least half the time and would save our butts doing this for future projects. I doubt doing this will result with real time updates to the Excel file, but any way to link the two would be much much faster than what we're having to do now. Any help would be appreciated!

Thanks,

Ryan

[pendean]

Do you just use plain AutoCAD? aka "dumb" lines and plines that have little to extract to Excel and may be why you did not find a ready-made solution?
Or a specialized variant like ARCHITECTURE or MAP or... that create smart objects like all the ones you listed and are designed to be 'tabled" and linked to spreadsheets from inside those variants all day long?

[Ryan.Adams76SPW]

I use AutoCAD Architecture, I apologize I should've made that clear. But any tutorial or solution I look up always seems to be revolved around either base CAD or only bringing in an Excel sheet into CAD and not the other way around.

Do you happen to know of any articles that go into this that I could look at? I'd appreciate the help!

[pendean]

Now that your post is in the correct software forum... can you share a portion of one of your DWG files with ".... building envelope and any/every room within the building..." so we can have an idea of what you are working with?

TIA

[steven.bachman · Accepted solution]

We had to do the same thing a few years ago and the approach prior to my hiring was using unintelligent Polylines and manual arithmetic.

I rebuilt the process around Spaces and Schedules, although in retrospect the AEC Polygons would have been better for the purpose. Using the intelligent objects allowed the attachment of Property Set Definitions for the Schedules to use. Schedules are now exported to Excel where the various floors and buildings are included in a central database with all of the areas included. It is not linked, however. When there is a change within a building, that building gets re-exported to update the database. The end goal is to be able to access or mine the Property Set Data from an external application.

Similarly, Tables can be exported to .csv files and opened in Excel. If your Polyline areas are being picked up in a Table automatically, this can save you a lot of manual entry time in Excel.

[David_W_Koch]

For what it is worth, you can attach Property Sets to AutoCAD objects (including polylines) and schedule them as well.  You will get fewer automatic properties with AutoCAD objects, but for polylines, area is available.

I would recommend working with AEC objects, as mentioned by @steven.bachman, if you are starting a new project, but if you have existing projects that have already been "polylined" and you would rather not convert those to AEC objects of some type, then you could set up a Property Set that applies to Polylines and add an automatic property for area.  You will likely also want to add manual properties to identify each polyline (if they represent rooms, to hold the room name and room number, for example).  You could even set up a Schedule Tag to display the room name, room number and area in the drawing, if you wanted.  Or you could just create a Schedule Table and then export that to Excel.