Design tables

Is there any way to use design tables without having to use Excel? We
use OpenOffice and don't have a copy of MS Office. While we could buy
a copy of MS Office, I'm quite sure that the incompatibility between
the two would become a problem. Interestingly, it wouldn't be a
problem for the OO users. They can easily read and write MS Office
formats. It would be the engineers using MS Office that would be
locked out of the OO formatted documents. I know that this isn't
insurmountable, but using design tables with OO would be so much easier.

 

When did SolidWorks loose its dependency from MS Excel? I didn't think
you could even install SW without Excel on your computer?

 

To answer your question, no you can only use Excel. Instead of
purchasing the entire MS Office Suite, you could just purchase Excel.
The engineers would be able to continue using OpenOffice then utilize
Excel for SW. I am not familiar with OpenOffice, but why would you
need it open your design table? That information is impedded in the SW
file and typically is only used for SW.

 

I could set all the OO seats to use MS Office formats IF (big IF) I had
the authority to do so. I don't. And they won't (something to do with
the loss of formatting of existing docs when features aren't properly
implemented in MS Office).

 

I can't even get into the design table feature without having Excel
loaded. Is there some way to use design tables without Excel?

 

No you must have Excel

John Layne
www.solidengineering.co.nz