Subtitles of the Movie

In the previous exercise we purely utilized a csv file and took the data from it and imported it as a Table. What we're going to do this time is Link to a live Excel Spreadsheet and bring it in as a Table in our A1 using Live Tables Tab here. So what I'm going to do now is I'm going to bring that information in purely by clicking on the Annotation Panel on the Home Tab on the Ribbon, click on Table, and I'm going to use the Revision Table Table Style, and I'm going to go from a Data Link. Now I can select a Data Link, there isn't an existing one, so I click on the button here and create a New Excel Data Link. Now the name will be Block Quantities, make sure you spell it right and always do a sanity check just to make sure, and then it's asking me to Browse for a file. So I'm going to Browse, and there's my Block Quantities.xls. Notice it's an xls file and not a csv file. I click on Open there, I want to Link the entire sheet, which is there. There's my Preview there. I can actually select a Range that I want to link to, but I want all of it. So I want to link the entire sheet from Excel to AutoCAD. So, I OK that now. And as you can see there, there's my Data Link, my Block Quantities Data Link, so if I OK that now you'll see there, there's the Preview, Start from data link, all I need to do now is specify an insertion point. There's no need to specify columns and rows because it takes all of that from Excel, so I OK that. Specify an insertion point in the drawing, left-click, and there's my Table there. If I zoom in on that now you can see that all the information is there. Now, let's look at this in a little bit more detail. I'm going to zoom in now on that Table and I'm going to zoom in on the top of the Table there. There's my Block Quantities Table now. If I edit the Excel Spreadsheet and relink it will actually allow me to change values in Excel and update them into the drawing. So, let's have a look now. We've got our Shrub Detail there. Let's have a look at Shrub. There it is, just there, Shrub, there's 15 of them. So if I do an Alt-Tab now and go back to Excel, there's Shrub there, I'm going to change that value there to 20, and I'm then going to Save the file. Now this isn't affecting the number of Shrub Blocks in the drawing, by the way. So I save the file like so. If I now do an Alt-Tab and go back to AutoCAD it tells me that a Data Link has changed. So if I update the Table using the Data Link like so, that'll update, and notice my Shrub value there has gone to 20. So people can update the spreadsheet, the information can be updated in the drawing. Now in this particular case it's slightly misleading because I'm using Block Quantities as my xls file, but it hasn't actually affected any blocks in the drawing; I was just using that as a representation of an Excel Spreadsheet to show you how the Live Table Data in the Excel Spreadsheet can be updated in the drawing. So as you can see there, using Live Tables can be extremely effective and productive in AutoCAD 2010.