Exporting General Notes Text from Excel into AutoCad

[JohnyD]

Our company is attempting to see if there is anyway to quickly edit and format large multi lines of text for our general notes. When editing a very long string of Mline text, the program scrolls very slow which slows down the ability to quickly make edits and jump around.

The general notes are fairly standard with about 4 indent lines for aligning text. So the question is would there be anyway to create these notes in excel? Possibly by typing each line of code into its own cell and moving down and over when the text is meant to be indented. I know this is most likely not possible but was asked by a higher up to take a look into it and after numerous failed google searches, I was hoping to see if a forum would be a better option.

Many Thanks!

 

[Sparweb]

Hi JohnyD,
I'm curious about your problem where "the program scrolls very slow which slows down the ability to quickly make edits and jump around."
There may be a setting in this Mline that is dragging down the performance.
Do you have hardware acceleration turned on or off?
Have your general notes block been written in a standard text STYLE? Or are there multiple overrides in your MLINE text block?
I would rather solve the MLINE problem before resorting to the Excel solution (and I think so would you).

You can do what you are describing, but I don't recommend it, unless you are very comfortable with linked and embedded files.
The Clipboard is all you need. Select the block of text in Excel you want, paste it into AutoCAD. It may look like crap but it will be there.
What that does is link an object into AutoCAD through Object Link Exchange (OLE) and the result is not connected to the spreadsheet you started with any more.
Instead, it's an embedded piece of Excel spreadsheet, and you can edit it by selecting the text block and right-clicking to find "OLE->Edit".

It is hard to make this look nice. 1001 details to make it pretty may be frustrating or easy, depending on your knowledge of ACAD and EXCEL.
OLE in AutoCAD also has some strange behaviors, which you may not discover until after you commit to using it regularly for a few months.
If you or your co-workers can claim to be software "breakers" that are used to putting a function or a feature through its paces before deploying it on your coworkers, then maybe you have a chance of discovering what these strange things are, and figuring out the work-around so that your least-experienced users will not blow their fuses.

If not, then this strategy can be a good way to make office enemies.


No one believes the theory except the one who developed it. Everyone believes the experiment except the one who ran it.
STF