Inventor, Autocad and Excel Linking

[AMN3161]

Hello everyone,

We currently build very large piping skids, we use Auto cad to draw the P&ID (Piping and instrumentation diagram)with the equipment and tags. Then we use Inventor to design the systems based off of those P&IDs. Now we have the same P&ID tags on a excel table with equipment descriptions. We have to retype the same data in autocad, excel and inventor and constantly update it in all software and if often runs into problems where one isnt updated while the others are.

I am familiar-ish with Ilogic within Inventor and link excel within Autocad, but is there a good way to link all three software to one master document? even third part software

Any help will be appreciated, i can build something completely custom too via logic and excel but is there a better method? 

[WCrihfield]

I haven't coded within Autocad for many years, but I know that when you link the parameters of an Inventor document to an external Excel spreadsheet document, the values of those parameters become read-only within the parameters dialog box in that Inventor document.  Then they are fully driven from the Excel document.  If you want to change the value of one of the linked parameters, you have to open and edit the linked Excel spreadsheet.

However, you don't necessarily have to link the Inventor file to the Excel file to work with it, because you could use iLogic, VBA, etc, to send & retrieve data from the Excel file from Inventor.  But I don't know how these things may work on the Autocad side.