Autodesk - AutoCAD - VBA: Integrating with Microsoft Excel - Part 1
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VBA: Integrating with Microsoft Excel - Part 1
By dave-espinosa aguilar
This article is the first in a series on integrating the programming
power of AutoCAD® VBA with the functionality found in other Windows
applications—specifically, Microsoft Excel. Through Visual Basic
programming within AutoCAD, you can launch Excel and bring the full
power of a spreadsheet application into an AutoCAD drawing session.
The information in this series will demonstrate how to generate,
organize, query, and extract linework visibly or behind the scenes
during an AutoCAD session without spending a dime on additional
compilers or documentation. If you have AutoCAD and Microsoft Excel
already loaded on your workstation, this technology is ready and
waiting for you to take advantage of it.
To enter the world of Visual Basic programming and add Excel
functionality to AutoCAD software, you have to be willing to spend the
time it takes to master this object-oriented programming tool. Even if
you've programmed in AutoLISP® before, Visual Basic is not as
forgiving or as accommodating, and the rules that must be obeyed for
everything to work right when you run your own VB applications are
very strict. This isn't to say that an AutoLISP programmer can't
conquer the world of Visual Basic; it just takes more dedication and
effort.
So... as with any serious investment of your time, it pays to step back
and examine what getting up to speed on Visual Basic (and the
integration of AutoCAD VBA and Microsoft Excel) brings to your table
in the first place. The more you learn about the software you already
own, the more powerful it gets and the more impact it stands to have
on your productivity. If the nature of your drawings and designs lends
itself to spreadsheet functionality, then consider setting aside notions
of cranking out code, and go Zen with me for a bit as we consider
some potentially profound questions... beginning with "Why should any
AutoCAD user care that integration of AutoCAD and Microsoft Excel is
even possible?"
Reason #1: Automated Fully Customizable Part Counts
Have you ever counted entities in a drawing manually? By that I mean
to ask have you ever (with your finger or pencil) tallied every parking
lot space or every chair or every toilet in a bathroom or window on an
exterior building wall or every HVAC fixture throughout a series of roof
plans? Have you every counted sprinklers or landscaping features by
plant type, bolts or screws for an assembly, or datapoints for a given
site plan? Imagine pressing a menu button and being done with the
process!
Reason #2: Queries
Maybe you use blocks with attributes. Have you ever wished you could
count blocks (or maybe even select them) based on the values in
those attributes? Maybe you use Extended Entity Data, which
attaches gobs of unique information to individual entities. Wouldn't it
be slick if there were an easy way to take the sum or average of that
information within seconds?
There are some ingenious tricks and techniques out there like using
the old SSX.LSP routine, the internal FILTER command and various
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Autodesk - AutoCAD - VBA: Integrating with Microsoft Excel - Part 1 http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/item?siteID=123112&id=2671...

other filtering functions in AutoCAD, layer isolations, the ATTEXT

Block Attribute extraction to CDF/SDF command, and even basic
select-objects techniques to report entity counts in a drawing. But
none of them come close to the reporting, querying, and attachment
control that a linked spreadsheet application can offer.

Want to specify the name of a block with an attribute value that falls
within a certain numeric range and have those entities meeting that
criteria reported with full text formatting in a real spreadsheet
template? You can with VBA. Imagine reporting attribute information
or extended entity data from entities based on their location in the
drawing or even based on the way in which they are being used or
were originally generated (for example, count all blocks named "x" that
were inserted by CAD operator "y" during month "z" of last year). If
you're a SQL guru, you could actually query blocks with attribute data
using a SQL query statement—entirely through VBA.

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

Reason #6: Tabulation

In an AutoCAD drawing, put a bunch of text entities with numeric
values (for example, currency) in a vertical column (see Figure 1).
Now add them up and report that value at the bottom of the column.
Oops! Something changed. Edit one of the text entity values and
retotal everything. Find their average value or their minimal value or
their maximum value and report that, too, at the bottom of the column.
Oops! Sales tax just went up! Increase all of the text entity values by a
new percentage value and change the new total at the bottom of the
column. Are we having fun yet?

For years, people have been using TEXT entities to report tabulated
data on drawings without the benefit of tabulation tools to do it, and a
TEXT entity doesn't know the difference between a dollar and a toilet.
Spreadsheets have been cranking out this kind of information for over
a decade. Think hard about this one, folks. Maybe, just maybe, the
process of creating schedules is possible without getting a headache.

Figure 1: Creating a schedule even this simple is time-consuming to construct and tally
without a spreadsheet.

Reason #7: True Text-Formatting Control

At the recent AUGI® Annual General Meeting, the top 10 wish-list
items were announced for the year and right up there near the top (for
the umpteenth year in a row) was "tabbing for MTEXT"). If you've ever
tried to align columns of TEXT or reorganize the line-by-line textual
content of an entity after its assigned width space changed (a very
painful process), or if you've ever tried to perform any number of basic
text-formatting manipulations within AutoCAD software (which are a
cinch to do in Excel), you know how hard it is. Now you don't have to
wait for such tools. By importing spreadsheet data (or even my linking
and/or embedding it), you can bring full text control to your AutoCAD
drawings (see Figure 2). Changing the assigned width of columns of
textual or numerical data can be as simple as a drop-and-drag
operation.

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Figure 2: When you bring Excel grids into your drawings, you have complete control
over text formatting, column width, cell border thickness, and even background
patterning.

Reason #8: Formulas?

What else can a spreadsheet do with data in a cell? Well for one
thing, it can contain a formula to generate cell content based on other
cells. That means that you can actually apply formulas for TEXT
entities in your drawings! Aside from obvious uses of this capability
(such as generating totals after a part count), you could even use
Excel to figure out (through conditional states) what text, notes, or
details need to be imported into a drawing based on parts found in a
drawing. Yes, folks... this starts getting wild.

Reason #9: Automated Linework Generation

And while we're on the subject of things being imported based on
queries and tallies and other amazing spreadsheet operations, we can
also generate linework itself from spreadsheets. You can convert
databases to an Excel format, and easily view and edit them. And
once you have that data in a spreadsheet format, it is possible to start
generating linework from it! Imagine that you have a basic COGO
point set of X, Y, and Z values broken down into three columns.
Contour lines or TINs could be generated from this information.

Reason #10: Costing Out a Drawing

Excel spreadsheets make great reference tables. Imagine that you
have a list of prices for items you insert into your drawings, and
imagine that you want a part count and a financial assessment of a
drawing. To do this, you can begin with surveys of the entity database,
pulling the necessary computational information into preset columns in
a spreadsheet, and then price out the cost of the entire project based
on an entirely different spreadsheet of price-per-item values.
Inventories on steroids, and generated no less by a CAD user!

I could give you in a heartbeat another 10 reasons to think seriously

about this stuff, from enhanced job opportunities and more
competitive salaries to the complete historical tracking of any drawing.
In the coming articles, we'll examine sample code and develop
microapplications that accomplish the types of operations described
above. And it's not miracle working. It is, however, exciting and
profitable stuff... for anyone willing to learn the game.

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