Update ACAD Drawing with Quarterly data

[Anonymous]

I am an environmental engineer and use ACAD for maps with monitoring wells.  These wells have groundwater elevations reported and are located all over the drawing next to each respective well.  The new elevations are in an excel table.  I normally go from the table and manually input the elevations to each well.  Is there a way to import the elevations from the table to update them in ACAD.  For one site I have 30+ wells and manually there can be a lot of error.  Thanks in advance for the help!

[rkmcswain]

When you say update them in ACAD, are you talking about changing text objects in AutoCAD based on a value of a cell in Excel?

If so, is there always a relationship between a given text object and the location of the data (same Excel file, same worksheet, same cell)?

[Anonymous]

Yes - that is what I mean. Can you show me how to do that?

[john.vellek]

Hi @Anonymous,

Is it possible to share a sample drawing and Excel  file so I can see the types of data you are having to update?  I would like to explore some options but want to make sure they will work for you.

Please select the Accept as Solution button if my post solves your issue or answers your question.

[rkmcswain · Accepted solution]

@Anonymous - one way would be to make a Data Link to your Excel File. Then make a TABLE object (not plain text), and link the table to the desired cell or cells in the Excel worksheet. An animation of this is below.  I started with a saved worksheet and drawing. Then I update the cell, save the worksheet, then update AutoCAD.

[john.vellek]

HI @Anonymous,

I like @rkmcswain's example for you but we are just guessing as to the information you have.  If the values are not numeric then this gets very tricky using a DATALINK.

Another method might be to use the Express tools ATTIN and ATTOUT.  Alternatively, you could link all the data to a database using DBCONNECT.

You are welcome to attach a sample file to better illustrate with what you are working on.

Please select the Accept as Solution button if my post solves your issue or answers your question.

[Anonymous]

That is what I need.  Thank you so much.  I don't think I can show an example because it is analytical data from a company but this should work.  Thanks!

[Anonymous]

Thank you John,

We used to insert some text instead of numeric values, but they are all numeric.  I appreciate your help!

[rkmcswain]

john.vellek wrote:

...but we are just guessing as to the information you have.  If the values are not numeric then this gets very tricky using a DATALINK.

@john.vellek, @Anonymous stated in the original post that these were elevations, so I presumed they would be numeric.

Having said that, I don't understand why you said that non-numeric values are "tricky"? I made a similar example where one cell is text, and another was changed from numeric to text, and I don't see any issues. Thanks.

[john.vellek]

Hi @rkmcswain,

I misunderstood your process but Kudos to you as this might work well for the OP.  I originally thought that once you had the datalink table in the drawing that you were then linking a field (perhaps in a block attribute) to a specific cell in the inserted table.  That process seems to only like numbers on my side because the link needs to be a formula.

I like your solution!