About Linking Microsoft Excel Files

You can combine information from an entire Microsoft Excel spreadsheet or only a specified range with data extracted from drawings. For example, you can extract beam lengths from a drawing and then combine them with cost information from an external spreadsheet.

The workflow for including data from an existing Microsoft Excel file into the data extraction table includes the following steps:

• Specify a data link
• Match the data extracted from the drawing with the data from the spreadsheet
• Select the columns from the spreadsheet to merge with extracted drawing data

Using External Spreadsheets with the Data Extraction Wizard

The Data Extraction wizard lets you specify a set of entities or blocks and extract properties and attributes information that you will use later to create bill of materials, schedules, tables of quantities.

The Refine Data page of the Wizard provides access to the Link External Data dialog box where you can set up a link between the extracted data from the drawing and an external spreadsheet. To merge the two sets of data, it is necessary to specify a data matching column in the external spreadsheet to match a column from the data extraction table.

The data matching column creates a relationship between the data extracted from the drawing and the data from the Excel spreadsheet. The data matching column is valid if there is at least one cell matching between the data in the drawing data column and the external data column.

If data match validation process fails, an error message indicates what the problem is.

• No match was found between any values in the drawing data and external data
• The data column in the external data does not contain unique values

To link Data in a Data Extraction Table to an External Spreadsheet:

1. On the Refine Data page of the Data Extraction wizard, click Link External Data.
2. In the Link External Data dialog box, do the following:
   1. Under Data link, specify an existing data link or click Open Data Link Manager to create a new one. See Creating and Managing Data Links.
   2. Under Data Matching, specify the columns to link.
   3. Click Match.
   4. From the Select External Data Columns to Include, select the columns to add to the extracted data.
   5. Optionally, select Use top row of external data as column names to use the top row of the Excel spreadsheet as column names