The "Power" Of Excel and AutoCAD Electrical©

 

Recently I have spent quite a bit of time working on AutoCAD Electrical data mastering. What this means is I am taking legacy AutoCAD (or other CAD systems) drawings (possibly even only hard printed copy) then completing them in AutoCAD Electrical as a complete set of data. How far we take it really depends on the project and the client requirements are. There are some very powerful workflows that can be used when trying to work on mastering this data set.

   

The two main tools in this workflow is AutoCAD Electrical and Microsoft Excel. There are several tools in AutoCAD Electrical that allow the "Export" of AutoCAD Electrical to several different formats including Microsoft Excel. Microsoft Excel is a great tool for performing find / replace of data, copying of data, comparisons etc… Some things you might want to change could be a description from "Hydraulic" to "Pneumatic" or even update location / installation codes from an old location to a new one.

   

After manipulating the data to obtain the results you require, you can use the AutoCAD Electrical Update from Spreadsheet tool. Now AutoCAD Electrical will read that information from the Excel spreadsheet and start working on updating your data.

   

More to Come…..