Populating Excel Table Into 1000 AutoCAD drawings

[JaredLee]

I originally posted this in the Spreadsheet Forum. Somebody suggested me to move it here.

I am a Piping Designer and in many times I have to do the following repeated works:

We have 11x17 Piping ISO drawings in AutoCAD or MicroStation. Most of the time the drawing number is over 100, some time is more than 1000. In each drawing there is a shcedule imcorporated pipe line's specification data, including length, spec, insulation thickness, pressure etc.

Meanwhile, I also have to prepare exactly same pipe line's specification data in Excel. We call it LDT (Line Data Table).

We have to key in the same data twice (CAD and Excel). It takes us hundreds of hour to open 1000 drawings and change text in these drawings. After that the checkers also spend lots of time to check it. They open 1000 drawings and check it against Excel spreadsheet.

There are more headaches when the revisions coming in. In many time designer changes one place and forget to change another (CAD or Excel), which caused many inconsistencies in our work.

My question is:

Is there a good way, some add-ons to AutoCAD and MicroStation, for us to populate our LDT in Excel into 1000 drawings and maintain a link between CAD and Excel, so that for any revision we only need to change one place and the other will get updated.

 

[dsi]

Sounds like you would need to develop a custom application to do this. I am not sure about MicroStation, but this would definately work with AutoCAD.

DimensionalSolutions@Core.com
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[burtonli]

if you used AutoCAD2k or newer, you can use "insertobject" and choose "link" model.