Pasting Excel into AutoCad 2

[davissc]

I have searched the forums for help on this topic, but haven't found what I'm looking for. My problem is, like many others, AutoCad truncates the excel spreadsheet I am pasting. I do this operation very frequently and would like a permanent fix and would be willing to pay up to $300 for it. Pasting several blocks and resizing the spreadsheet are too time consuming. Is there a program that will do paste Excel correctly? Our company found a program to do this operation in MicroStation, but not for AutoCad. I looked at “Spanner” as suggested by an earlier post, but I was wondering if there were others. Thanks

 

[jugglerbri]

davissc,

Check out

http://www.dotsoft.com

for Terry Dotsons ToolPac. I haven't used it but I have heard that his program works around the limitations of the 1 page restriction in OLE objects.

Brian

 

[mroberts]

There is a program called Spanner that works very well. We bring large spread sheets into autocad all the time with it. Go to

http://www.wfcadtools.com/span40.htm

 

[jschultz]

i can tell of a place that has an open source excel-vba program to do just what you want. I have been bug testing and helping to polish it some. It is located at the forums of

http://www.vbdesign.net

. we are in the process of trying to figure out a new name for it. Right now it is called livelink II. You could donate that $300 to the site to help support their operating costs. The site is supported by donations.

livelink II features that spanner does not have.
does hatching for cell shading
does diagonal lines
merged cells work.
open source
no cost
wrapped text turns into mtext

check it out

 

[paron]

I went there, can't find the download. Can you post a link to a specific page at the site? I went to (site)>downloads>excel.

 

[jrfosterjr]

As Brian (jugglerbri) noted above, I highly recommend ToolPac 7.0. I've used it for years and the hundreds of tools available make it well worth the cost. However, ToolPac is not the software they offer that does what you need. They offer XL2CAD, which will do exactly what you need.

There is a good chart on the following page that will show it's superiority to other spanner software as well as explain just how it works:

http://www.dotsoft.com/xl2cad.htm

Only $60.00 as well. For $295.00 you can get everything they offer and let me tell you, it is well worth it. Jeff Foster, PE
CE Group, Inc.
Apex, NC

 

[paron]

OK, if anyone is still with us, here; I found LivelinkII at

http://www.vbdesign.net/cadencoding/files/LiveLink.zip

It's available as a link from

http://www.cadencoding.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=12

It works. Not perfect, and not perfectly intuitive, but it works, and it is free. Interestingly, it is an Excel spreadsheet with a custom toolbar, a lot of macros, and places for you to make settings for rendering the "Schedule" (i.e., the workbook cells you are intending to paste into AutoCAD.)

Here's the pseudoprocedure I found worked the best:

1. Open a drawing in ACAD
2. Open the workbook you want to copy from in Excel (the livelink documentation refers to them as "Schedules&quot
3. Open LiveLinkII-17.xls and enable the macros when prompted
4. Click on the "Draw in CAD" button on the toolbar at the top of the LiveLink workbook.

Now, here's the part I found unintuitive. A dialog box will pop up asking you which cells to draw. You need to change windows so that you are looking at the "target" workbook (the one that you were trying to copy from when you started all this.) To do that, you can't click on the toolbar at the bottom of your windows desktop. You have to go to the "Window" menu, at the top of the Excel program window, and select your original workbook there. There, that's really the worst. The rest is EZPZ, and free, too.

5. Change to the window showing your original workbook as described above.
6. Select the cells you want copied. Notice that the dialog box includes the name of the original worksheet.
7. Click "OK" on the dialog box.
8. Switch to AutoCAD. It will be prompting you for the (upper left) insertion point for the table.
9. Enter the insertion point. Your computer will go back to showing the LiveLink workbook, and a Progress Bar. When the progress bar finishes, your table will be in the AutoCAD drawing.

All in all, it's a decent effort at meeting a crying need, and it's open source as well. Thank you jschultz for the tip and the work.

Ron

 

[IFRs]

I just tried pasting a Excel spreadsheet into Autocd R2004 and it semed to work flawlessly

 

[ddr]

davissc, I think you will find that AutoCAD 2004 pretty much fixed the problem. It was also a Windows problem and Autodesk and MS got together this time around to work it out. I haven't had a problem since.
HTH
Rob Davis