Quickly Link Excel Tables to AutoCAD
Since being posted back in April my post titled Linking Excel and AutoCAD with Data Links has been one of the most visited pages here on The CAD Geek Blog. In that post I go through what I will call the manual way of linking an Excel table to AutoCAD. Thus unless you are a part of the Slowskey family, you’ll likely prefer this quicker more efficient way of making the link.
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Start off in Excel by simply selecting the cells you want to link to AutoCAD. Right-click and select “Copy“. This will place the Excel table on your clipboard so we can paste it into AutoCAD.
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Open the AutoCAD drawing you wish to insert your Excel table into, and go to the “Edit” menu, selecting “Paste Special”.
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From the resulting dialog box, Select the “Paste Link” radio button, and then select “AutoCAD Entities” under the “As” heading.
Select an insertion point for your table, and just like that you have a table which is linked to AutoCAD. If you have “DYN” turned on (available from status bar) you will see some helpful information when you hover over the table.
First notice the two icons in the Northeast quadrant of your cursor. The padlock icon to the left indicates that the table is locked. What that means is changes to the Excel document will be updated in AutoCAD as well, however you cannot make a change in AutoCAD and it update Excel. The second icon is supposed to be two chain links. That is letting you know the table contents are being red from an external Excel table.
Finally if you have dynamic input (DYN) turned on the southeast quadrant of your cursor will show some information about the data link associated with the table. AutoCAD automatically generates a Data Link when you use the Paste Special method, hence the Excel Data Link 1 name. Other information like the path to the linked Excel table and what cells are being displayed is among the data previewed.
While AutoCAD does have the ability to write back to Excel, I have found the methodology in doing such to be very cumbersome. Instead, I have found it easier to modify the Excel table by opening the Excel document itself. This is relatively easy to do within AutoCAD by:
- Select a cell within your AutoCAD Table
- Under “Data Links” select “Open Data File“. That will load Excel, and take you to the linked Excel document.
In my humble opinion that method is a lot easier than unlocking the cell(s) you want to modify, changing the data, and then writing back to the data source. Finally if you’re in a drawing, and the Excel document gets modified. AutoCAD will not update the table in real-time. You could close and re-open the drawing, but a little easier method is to select the table > right-click > “Update Table Data Links”.
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Very interesting, what you have found about Excel tables. Do you know how can I save a viewport rendering?, I can not do that in AutoCAD 2008, “saveimg” does not work. I will apreciate any information about it. Thanks.
I was trying to link the excel spread sheet to the AutoCAD drawing and was not able to select the “paste link function”. The “paste” function was automatically selected and the “paste link” function is shaded gray to where you can’t select it. Could you possible go into detail how I can solve this?
your excel link is excelent, it save time as you work.thanks for sharing to autocad user
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When importing an excel (2003) schedules with images within them into Autocad 2008 the cells with the images plot solid black. The excel sheets are imported using the paste special\paste link feature as a Microsoft Office Excel Worksheet.
The plotter drivers are the most current and AutoCAD 2008 is up to date also. Is there something in the .pc3 file under graphic that I need to set?
We are using a XEROX 510 laser plotter.
David D.
Is it possible link a autocad MText to one excel cell using a script?
Maybe something like FileName.xls!.Sheet!.CellN! ….
Did somebody ever tryed something similar to this?
Barny - since the intriduction of tables we have been able to create a single-cell table. To that end, we should be able to select a single cell in Excel, and link it to AutoCAD. As for doing it with a script - that I am not sure about. I personally haven’t played around with the command line options of the data link commands in 2008.
I have recently switched from Auto-CAD 2005 to 2008 - - and I have been using the paste special command for sometime but I can not get the border to stop printing in the newer version i s there a setting to turn this option off?
I presume you’re pasting things as an OLE Object (ie not an AutoCAD Table). Much like the setting for images, OLE objects have a frame option. The command (system variable actually) is OLEFRAME. I’d suggest setting that to 2 which will display the frame in the drawing, but will not plot it.
Good , i shall make use
I am not finding Auto cad entities under As heading in Dialog box , what is the reason?
You will not have “AutoCAD Entities” as an option under Paste Link unless you are running AutoCAD 2008 or newer.
while trying the paste special option - it only pastes part of the table. Is there a reason it isn’t pasting the whole number of rows and columns?
While special pasting a link from excell in AutoCad 2005, there is a limit to the number of columns and rows that you can link at one time. Is there a limit on the number of columns and rows “LINKED” in AutoCad 2008?
Greg - I don’t remember the specific limitations of AutoCAD 2005. No less, I personally haven’t run into said limit in AutoCAD 2008. Frankly, I have been rather satisfied with the improved Excel AutoCAD relationship introduced in the 2008 release.
Once the excel spreadsheet is in the dwg - formatting is next to impossible. cells containing data derived from formulas in excel import into cad as txt font, the rest in arial, plus a decimal and 4 zeros. my favorite trick match properties is useless and the decimal and zeros won’t delete! am i missing something obvious?