Autocad OLE feature

[chicopee]

a drill plan of a PC board is developed in acad 2004. To locate the holes with X's and Y's, I do a listing and copy this listing to clipboard. I invoke the OLE object command from the insert pull down menu and select MS excel worksheet from object type as well as selecting create new; then I paste from clipboard the entire history of the hole locations. I want to clean this history before copy to and paste from clipboard when returning to the autocad drawing screen. The clean process is tedious and time consuming and the Excel program does not lend itself to be efficiently used such as erasing rows and columns of unwanted information. Does anybody have any suggestion?

 

[twlincoln]

>Does anybody have any suggestion?

Yes... fairly simple.

It involves using a unit block for your hole(s), exporting the X & Y locations (insertion points) via EATTEXT directly to an XLS sheet. And then copy/pasting that back into AutoCAD as %Product Entities vs an OLE Object.

or use a product like AutoCAD Mechanical, Mechanical Desktop or Inventor that automates the hole chart creation process.

- Tracy

 

[chicopee]

thanks tracy

 

[chicopee]

Tracy--tried your procedure and I realized that since this board has 320 holes ,I would have to turned each hole into a block with the insertion points at the centers of the holes. EATTEXT will list the insertion coordinates of the blocks but the coordinates are based on the UCS world position and not based on a UCS new origin which would be a corner of the board.
So far doing a history of the holes and pasting on word or note pad for editing purposes and then pasting back to autocad seems to be faster.
Am I missing something w/ your suggestion?

 

[twlincoln]

Sorry I assumed the origin of the pc board was at 0,0...

You can XREF the board layout into a new drawing, move the xref from the corner to 0,0... BIND > INSERT and then run EATTEXT.

BTW you can export directly to an XLS or MDB from EATTEXT

- Tracy

 

[chicopee]

will try it-thanks!!

 

[twlincoln]

One last thought...

Why not simply export the block's insertion points (EATTEXT) to an XLS file directly. Then create two additional columns and simply deduct the differeence in the X & Y distance of the parts UCS vs. WCS?

Or move the part so the origin is 0,0,0 in the WCS?

- Tracy