Add excel or word file to layout?

[Anonymous]

Is there any way to insert an Excel spreadsheet or Word document to a layout or drawing and have it "link" to the original so it updates instead of being a static picture or bunch of individual objects? Wasnt there a way to do this before Ver 10?

[James Murray]

On Windows they had OLE in 9. In OS X, it's always been copy/paste.

In 10, use PDFs. They can be live links.

[Anonymous]

Thanks James - i'll check it out. One of our people was really upset about losing that ability.

[Haneef Tayob]

I used to enjoy the OLE facility in Plotmaker 9, especially for drawings indexes and finishing schedules which I would paste from Excel. There were problems where I would lose the link, which is why the pdf option didn't sound to bad.

My main concern now is with the conversion of the spreadsheets to autocad and dxf files. The pdf's of these text items get converted to images, which are not simple to manage, especially when you have to e-mail and share these with consultants. I haven't yet tested how they print once converted to these formats

I've now compromised in that simple text items for items I know will have to be shared with other cad programs will not be linked to pdf's , but will use one of the paste options.

[Djordje]

Haneef wrote:
I used to enjoy the OLE facility in Plotmaker 9, especially for drawings indexes and finishing schedules which I would paste from Excel. There were problems where I would lose the link, which is why the pdf option didn't sound to bad.

My main concern now is with the conversion of the spreadsheets to autocad and dxf files. The pdf's of these text items get converted to images, which are not simple to manage, especially when you have to e-mail and share these with consultants. I haven't yet tested how they print once converted to these formats

I've now compromised in that simple text items for items I know will have to be shared with other cad programs will not be linked to pdf's , but will use one of the paste options.

The loss of OLE is the greatest loss of Archicad 10, IMHO. Still don't understand why ...

[Anonymous]

Djordje wrote:

Haneef wrote:
I used to enjoy the OLE facility in Plotmaker 9, especially for drawings indexes and finishing schedules which I would paste from Excel. There were problems where I would lose the link, which is why the pdf option didn't sound to bad.

My main concern now is with the conversion of the spreadsheets to autocad and dxf files. The pdf's of these text items get converted to images, which are not simple to manage, especially when you have to e-mail and share these with consultants. I haven't yet tested how they print once converted to these formats

I've now compromised in that simple text items for items I know will have to be shared with other cad programs will not be linked to pdf's , but will use one of the paste options.

The loss of OLE is the greatest loss of Archicad 10, IMHO. Still don't understand why ...

EPS too.....

[Anonymous]

James wrote:
On Windows they had OLE in 9. In OS X, it's always been copy/paste.

In 10, use PDFs. They can be live links.

James, the links are "live" in the sense that they will update for any Manually updated PDF from the Excel or Word file.

[Djordje]

Jay wrote:

James wrote:
On Windows they had OLE in 9. In OS X, it's always been copy/paste.

In 10, use PDFs. They can be live links.

James, the links are "live" in the sense that they will update for any Manually updated PDF from the Excel or Word file.

Correct.

The best feature of PlotMaker was that you could bring in anything (except PDF, granted) - now, we have PDF, but have lost OLE and EPS?!?!?!

Obviously, some people don't understand that cooperation is the name of the game ... and if this is done to appease the Maccers, I do think that they would be more appeased by the Mactel version coming out in July as promised.

[Haneef Tayob]

I have another workaround to this problem without having to use the pdf route, especially if you need to export the layout as vector elements.

Copy the item from MSExcel or MSWord and then paste as 'Archicad 2d Elements'
Unlike plotmaker 9 which did not have a 'resize' option, Archicad10 does have it. So you can then resize the pasted spreadsheet to the size you want.

Unfortunately its not a live link and sometimes single sentences get split up.

As expressed by everyone else, the OLE feature of AC9 was one of the feature I would brag about to colleagues.