Managing Fonts Used in Tables Linked to a Spreadsheet (AutoCAD 2008)

I love that you can link an Excel spreadsheet to an AutoCAD table. This is a very powerful tool, but I quickly discovered a problem: you can’t use .shx fonts an Excel spreadsheet.

Our CAD standards dictate that we use a .shx font but since it cannot be used inside Excel the AutoCAD table takes on the same non-standard font used in the spreadsheet. All of my AutoCAD tables linked to a spreadsheet were coming in with a non-standard font and it was a pain reformatting each and every cell. That’s when I discovered this little secret. Read more »

Writing AutoCAD Scripts With Excel

A while back, I received some survey data in the form of a comma-delimited text file containing rows of Northings, Eastings, & elevations. I needed to take that information and place blocks at every location in my drawing. At the time I only had plain AutoCAD (I wasn’t using Civil 3D yet). Being lazy, I wasn’t about to sit there and type the coordinates by hand. So I wrote a script! Here is how I did it. Read more »

Table Wrapping – Part 1

In AutoCAD 2008 they introduced “table wrapping” (AKA table breaks), as I call it. Read more »

Paste Excel Data into AutoCAD 2008

Previously I talked about Linking Excel Spreadsheets to AutoCAD Tables but this time I am going to show you an even simpler way to get Excel data into an AutoCAD table. Read more »

Linking Excel Spreadsheets to AutoCAD Tables (AutoCAD 2008+)

You may have heard about how you can link Microsoft Excel spreadsheets to a table in AutoCAD 2008 and have them stay in sync with each other. It is easy to do but it’s not as straight-forward as you might imagine. Here is how to do it in a few easy steps. Read more »