Plotting Excel inserted files

When I copy and paste an excel file into an AutoCAD 2005 file, it looks
fine, but plots text from the excel file in various parts of the page. Most
of it looks fine, but that 1% screws up the whole plot. Other than using
SnagIt to get a screen print of the file and inserting that instead of the
excel file, I can't get it to do this without errors. That doesn't look
nearly as nice (blocky) but does work. I can't let this machine beat me.
Any ideas? DesignJet 500.

 

xl2cad from www.dotsoft.com will solve your problem. I've been using it for
a couple of months now and haven't had any problems with output to laser
printers or plotters.
Dave
DDP

 

Thanks, Dave. I'm curious, did you move to this solution for the reasons I
listed, or what was your problem that the software solved?

 

Paul,
I have always avoided inserting Excel spreadsheets into Acad drawings like
the plague due to all of the problems associated with doing so. Once I tried
XL2CAD and found that there are no problems (yet), I decided that I can now
use spreadsheet inserts, which just streamlines my creation of schedules and
speeds up my process. I'm a big believer in Terry Dotson products having
used ToolPac for years and have just added Word2CAD. I'm not associated with
Dotsoft, just a very satisfied user of their products...
Dave

 

It solves all the [OLE, cut/paste, other workaround] related problems.
It "reads" the data in Excel, and imports this data using plain ole
AutoCAD entities - which of course plot just fine.

 

Thanks, RK and Dave! I'm certainly familiar with DotSoft. Glad to hear it
is an answer to the problems I'm having. Happy Holidays!

 

I did find that with acad 2005 I can pastespec excel cells as acad objects,
but with excel 2000, the formatting is lost. Not a bad command, though. I
don't know if it works better with higher versions of excel. I would like
to know if anyone has tried it. Meanwhile, I think I'll get a demo of
xl2cad and see it in action, because I know I'm not getting an update to MS
Office any time soon. Thanks again!

 

After a few weeks use of xls2cad, I have to agree that it does the trick! I
bought the bundle so that I also received word2cad. I have not tried that
yet, but I'm sure it is up to DotSoft standards and will work as advertised.
Thanks for the tip, Dave!
I used the ACAD tables function with Pastespec to turn Excel files into
AutoCAD objects, but after all the work I had to go through to make it look
"pretty", I still ended up with a black line going through a table somewhere
on the sheet. That line would move around on successive plots but would not
go away. I had 11 different tables on the plot along with an electrical
diagram, and the only complete solution was xls2cad. Very nice!
Paul

 

glad it worked out for you! And, yes, you will be happy with Word2CAD also

Dave

 

One last word is needed. XL2CAD, not xls2cad as I stated previously. Paul

 

I knew what you meant Did you know that Terry Dotson has NNTP newsgroups
for his products? They can be found at news.dotsoft.com
Dave

 

NNTP/HTTP shortcuts at http://www.dotsoft.com/contact.htm.

Thanks, Terry