Conditional formatting

[Anonymous]

I have a Autocad drawing of a boiler wall made of tubes. We do a Ultrasonic Thickness reading approximately every 12" up the wall to get an idea of where the boiler tubes may be thinning. We currently input the readings into Excell and use conditional formatting to show color for a certain range of thickness. I would like to show this color mapping directly on the AutoCad Drawing, giving an exact/ to scale representation of thickness of the tubes at a given elevation/ position. Any ideas appreciated.

[Victoria.Studley]

Hi @Anonymous,

Welcome to the community, and thank you for posting your question here!

You should be able to achieve this with a Datalink to your Excel spreadsheet. Could you post a small sample DWG and Excel document to illustrate exactly what you're working with for data?

I'll be happy to tailor a response to your files, and record a short video if this is possible. (If you'd rather not post them, that's fine, too. Just let me know, and I'll record a short process video with a generic file.)

[Anonymous]

Thank you for taking the time to look at this for me. I have attached the
AutoCAD file and the Excel workbook. If you were to just look at one
component such as "Combustor North Wall", that would be sufficient.
As it is right now, we provide our customer the CAD dwg for referencing the
elevation where sample reading was taken, but the Excel Workbook stands
alone, showing the readings on one tab and a graph on the other. I would
like to show the coloring/ graph on the CAD Dwg.
I am open to changing the drawing or the excel input sheet to achieve this
goal. This is how we have been doing it for years and want to improve on it.
Thanks again.

[h_s_walker]

There is a program (not Autodesk related) called Surfer, which will create contour plots which can be exported in DXF format.

I use it to create Halfcell plots.

[Victoria.Studley]

Hi @Anonymous,

Thank you for sending your files. I haven't been able to display the background color for the cells that are colored by conditional formatting, either via Datalink or a static table in AutoCAD. The only way I can maintain the color is to copy the cells from Excel and paste them as an OLE into the drawing. You could then scale the OLE, send it to the back, and display it behind your geometry. This seems heavy-handed to me, though.

If you have access to AutoCAD Architecture or AutoCAD MEP, you might be able to use Display Themes to accomplish this.

If you have access to Revit, conditional formatting is built right into the scheduling tools.

You may need to seek out a third-party application that can accomplish this, as @h_s_walker suggestion. You might find something on Autodesk Exchange to suit your needs.