Reason #3: Portability and Data Reporting

Are there people in your office who use Excel with the same impressive proficiency that you use AutoCAD software? Have you ever wanted to share your AutoCAD information with them in a format

with which they can easily work? Through coding, you can convert any kind of AutoCAD information into a format that speaks another Windows application's language. You can translate your vector base into a grid base or a record base. You can view, report, and analyze drawings with all the usual analytical bells and whistles in a spreadsheet (flow charts, pie diagrams, trend charts, and so on) so that non-AutoCAD users using their native reporting methods and their native graphical tools can easily understand that AutoCAD data.

Reason #4: Externalized Data

The golden rule of CAD drawing performance: small = fast. An AutoCAD session is never faster to work with than when you start it up. From then on, everything just goes downhill in terms of speed and performance. It makes sense to bust out any information in a drawing that is not immediately relevant to the work being done. For example, attributes eat up memory and they're cumbersome to work with. Why not store them (associated with the relevant entities) in spreadsheet cells rather than as nested entities in a drawing?

Data externalization provides two terrific benefits: external editing and manipulation of data and drawing-size reduction, which increases drawing performance. It is possible to open a spreadsheet and change the value of a cell without ever opening AutoCAD. Can you imagine how easy it would be to swap values of certain cells using Excel sorting/replacing or reformatting functions and have those changes immediately reflected in AutoCAD block attributes? How much smaller would your drawings be (and how much faster would they load, save, regenerate, and edit) if attribute entities were completely removed

from them? And while we're discussing attributes...

Reason #5: Hard-Coded Textual Options

Now this one might really play with your mind. Imagine that you could control (hardwire) those values you allowed to be entered for any particular use of text or blocks with block attributes. For example, imagine that when you open a drawing, it reads information read from a spreadsheet and automatically sends that data to a title block. Imagine that you could provide your users a combo box of preset textual or numeric values for any block's attribute values (based on the block name no less) when those blocks are inserted. And imagine that the hardwired set of values was controlled in a

password-protected master spreadsheet file so that only certain users could change the allowed values for those block attributes? There are

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Autodesk - AutoCAD - VBA: Integrating with Microsoft Excel - Part 1 http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/item?siteID=123112&id=2671...

actually ways (using AutoCAD VBA and Excel) to do this kind of thing. The stuff of dreams.