Using Excel as a Drawing Table Editor

The only other table manipulation I know of is to highlight the whole table, select 'Table>Save table>As table file'. This file has a .tbl extension and I don't think Excel can edit it. It mostly useful for getting a BOM you created in one format imported into another format.

David Janes

Thanks, I thought so. We're not on WF yet, wondered if it had been changed in that release.

David,

YES - you can do this but it will require a Pro/TOOLKIT application to synchronize the MS-Excel contents and formatting (e.g. fonts, alignments and merges) with the table you want in the Pro/E Drawing.

One major problem with this is that Pro/TOOLKIT is limited as to what you can actually create in the areas of Drawing Tables. As I recall, they can only be created in one direction (Right-Down/SE), and there are significant limitations in many of the detailed areas that would really make this slick. I think PTC has not done included this functionality because it was easer to embed MS-Excel files via OLE vs fixing Pro/TOOLKIT to actuall enable true synchonization between the different format. (in my humble opinion)

We use the p-Shell API to work between MS-Excel and Pro/E, the latest Pro/E mag has an artticle about how this works - and it is clean and fast. We have had several requests to program something like what you have asked about in the past. When we tell them about the limitations in Pro/E relative to creating drawing tables, they typically decide to suffer with what they got.

If you could live with some structured rules for usage, we can program this in a relative short period of time. We can probably have something like this done in about a week.

Cheers!

Dave