It will be a great help if someone can help on how to link the dimensions in the sketch from the drawing sheet to excel sheet. I wanted to link the dimensions so that when i alter the driving dimension all the driven dimensions to be updated in the excel sheet.
Thanks in advance...
Jaya,
I would insert the dimensions needed into a design table then export that out into
excel. But understand that once it is exported it loses it's parametricness.
Jaya, maybe you tell us more about what you're trying to do.
It's uncommon to encounter someone trying to drive a spreachsheet from a drawing instead of a model. Models are where you get the designtable support. So what people usually do is link the design table to the model.
The dimensions in the drawing are exposed through the API, so you could programatically, open a drawing and round up several dimension values to populate/update your spreadsheet.
What type of drawing is this, do you have a lot of them and what's the spreadsheet for-a report, quantity takeoff or somthing else?
I'll be interested to hear your answer.
John
If it helps, you can create a general table in a Solidworks drwing, link cells in that table to dimensions in the drawing and export the table to excel. Let me know if you want to go down this road and I'll give you some of the details of the process.
John, I would love to hear about this process. My situation that I'm trying to resolve is that I have a complicated model with a bunch of configurations that were not made from a design table, that I would like to create a drawing for. The drawing needs a design table and I would like to have the dimensions linked from the model (although the dimensions needed for the drawing were not used to create the model). My idea was to create driven dimensions in some sketches and have those dimesions populate the design table then use that design table in the drawing.
Please let me know if you have any simple solutions to this problem/resolution idea.
Thanks.
I would take a look at DriveWorks. This is an Add-In that is available in SolidWorks Office or better. You also should be able to download a free trial.
With Driveworks, you basically use a table to create parts or assemblies. Very easy to use.
Elise, that's not what I want to do. Here is a simply example of what I want to do:
D1 (red) is controlled by the design table as 40-80 in increments of 10.
The green dimension is always 5 (and is on both sides).
D3 (blue) is driven; I want this dimension to be automatically populated in the design table and configuration specific. I realize that I can simply use Excel formulas (in this case) to calculate what that dimension should be, however, in my complex situation that is not possible. So for this example the D3 column should read 30-70 in increments of 10, but it comes out as shown based on which configuration is active when the design table is loaded (as you can see it applies the same number to all configurations).
Does anyone have any ideas on how to achieve my goal?
Thanks in advance.
Use a design table within solidworks.
When you open the design table in a new window a fresh instance of excel will open. You can use the normal functionality of xcel to acheive what you are trying to do.
I'm not sure if it can be done but you can put the driven dimensions at part level and set them in the Design table or external excel file.