design tables

[ksauter]

I use design tables a lot. At work it's no problem because they have Excel installed. I use Open Office at home which works beautifully for everything except those things that require Microsoft applications. I don't want to buy Excel just so I can do design tables. Is there a way to tell SW to invoke Open Office Calc instead of Excel?

 

[CorBlimeyLimey]

Nope. If there was it would be known throughout the SW realm within minutes.

 

[rstupplebeen]

I would be ok with a CSV option.

Rob Stupplebeen

 

[ksauter]

Is anyone familiar enough with the SW API to know how SW invokes Excel, and is it possible to replace the call with the Open Office executable or even possibly rename the executable to excel.exe? A registry tweak, perhaps?

 

[handleman]

No. SW doesn't just open excel.exe. It actually "talks" back and forth with excel using excel api calls. This interaction is buried deep in a compiled .dll file or something somewhere.

Changing the OpenOffice executable to excel.exe and expecting that to work would be like learning the word "Japanese" and then expecting to be able to converse fluently with a native speaker.

-handleman, CSWP (The new, easy test)

 

[ksauter]

That pretty much kills that issue. Next question: How far back does SW go in using Excel versions before it just doesn't work anymore, or does SW use MS's 'upgraded' features in newer versions of Excel, thus forcing us to 'upgrade' (if you can call it that) to a later version of Excel?

 

[CorBlimeyLimey]

According to

http://www.solidworks.com/sw/support/SystemRequirements.html,

Excel 2002 is the earliest version.
You will have to experiment with older versions to disprove that.

 

[bsj0526]

I have been using SolidWorks with MS Office 2000 since SW 2006, and never have problems. Currently I am using SW 2009 SP 4.1.

 

[jefrado]

Warning:

We use design tables as part of a macro that automatically designs stuff.

We found that using old Excell versions, although it did work, ran 3 or 4 times slower and was more prone to locking up.

We couldn't figure out why one machine was running the macro so much slower than the other 3.

John