Pasting Excel Worksheets

[Richard]

This to me sounds like text formatting, windows vs mac, how can the tech guys go cross-platform, RISC vs M'soft code? I agree with your premise, but ask yourself one question, "DOES AUTOCAD WANT TO COMMUNICATE WITH THE REST OF US?"

They seem to have added the "pdf solution" lately, but what happened to real support of "dxf"? AND everytime an upgrade comes around, it alienates some users W '98, or '95, etc., etc. We all have history, our best work, it's got to work tomorrow, or our work is in vain!

[defjef]

Since I am not a user of VW worksheets, having found them very crude from when they first appeared, I have always thought of a spreadsheet as Excel. It is a very powerful program for formatting cells, numbers, references to other worksheets or cells within the same sheet. You can hide cells and so on. I find it hard to believe that a VW worksheet will offer these types of features. Counting obejects on the drawing may be a very useful tool and should not be abandoned in favor of an excel external link.

Now this mac vs pc thing is a major drag for many people despite the fact that most cross platform software DOES look and perform almost identically on either platform with minor exceptions. VW is one such program. This allows indiots such as myself to work on either environment with those software written for both. Even the OS with folders and mousing and so on now looks and works the almost the same.

I hope in the future that a NEW OS emerges which replaces BOTH PC and MAC, takes the best of both and can deal with legacy issues. The the MAC vs PC debate will be over and all engineering development will be done in ONE environment. Hopefully EVERYONE will benefit from this.

It is obvious which programs are "winners" Excel may be on of the best programs out there. I say if something is very good, why not find a way to "use" its power within VW.

In the end it is all about creating and communicating useful DATA on a coordinated set of readable documents. Anything which aids in that effort should be applauded.

[ccroft]

I just can't resist stepping up to defend our lowly worksheets once more. My typical drawing has 5 worksheets that have various cross-references to each other, most of these have references to cells within the same sheet. Cells that I want to hide are on sheets that are never open and exist solely for the purpose of collecting info from the drawing. This not only includes counts, but also names, areas,perimeters,heights,widths,and labour costs and hardware lists for each unit.

V-works has 8 different number formats including Dimension that will automatically format to the standard of the drawing. They all take leaders and trailers and they have accuracy or rounding settings where applicable.

The one thing they won't do is automatically resize a cell to accomodate more text.

A two way link would allow me to export the info gathered by my sheets to another program and update the info automatically as the drawing changes. Myself I wouldn't have much use for a link that only went from outside v-works in. The two-way link preserves all the functionality of the existing worksheets and adds that to a more powerfull formatting program.

On the other hand, if we had word-wrap with automatically resizing cells I think that many users wouldn't need an outside spread-sheet.

[James Milkey]

Sorry I started all this. I have no problem using VW worksheets and no problem using excel. Both seem to have there places. Since my company was doing dimmer rack schedules in Excel and we needed them on our drawing set we just took the Excel file and pasted it in. My question was why it pasted differently on the Mac vs. the PC, that's all. Thanks everybody.

Jim