Updating Plant Info (Pricing)

[jpetty_la]

Last Year I was given the daunting job of putting over 1000 plants from our master plant palette into vectorworks, complete with all information, custom rendered symbols for each, and of course the wholesale price of each plant from the nursery we use.

I created a custom master pricing worksheet complete with equations to automatically mark up and total plant quantities etc.

Jump to this year. I get the new 2012 nursery catalog complete with all their plant price markups. Adding to that, this nursery has decided to create an online login on their website and are going to update plant prices and availability weekly.

I am sitting here trying to figure out how the heck im going to update and continue updating these prices into the price field in my plant symbols. Please don't tell me I am going to have to open each individual symbol and update the price.

Is there a way to set up the worksheets to reference an outside file like Excel? Then I would only have to go through the hassle of referencing each plant price to a specific file once and from then on hit update and prices change immediatley.

What am I missing? I know im not the only one here that does landscape design/build and uses landmark to calculate and create plant schedules. How do you guys stay on top of these always changing prices?

[Ozzie]

I had a wish with the Existing Tree Tool wanting to collect data on site in Excel and input that backwards through ODBC into VW

I read up on it a little as per this post

http://kbase.vectorworks.net/questions/967/ODBC+Compatibility+-+Excel

Lots of works to get both VW and Excel ? formatted etc and working together ? if it works

I wonder if what we need is Vectorwork Worksheets as a standalone outside of VW tool that we could use rather than Excel or Numbers or whatever

For you if it works it may be simpler as you would not want to collect data on site

Edited February 8, 2012 by Ozzie

[jpetty_la]

I guess im just confused as how to use databases outside vectorworks, connect to them, and if its possible to simply update pricing on external database and have plant prices change in vectorworks.

thanks for the link Ozzie, I will play around with that now that I know there is a feature for accessing outside files like excel.

[Ozzie]

The link I gave you came from this thread

http://techboard.vectorworks.net/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=165675&Searchpage=1&Main=33579&Words=odbc&Search=true#Post165675

Sasha has done it - perhaps contact via PM for help

Edited February 9, 2012 by Ozzie