Adding database info to objects in Map3d

[Novarese]

I am also available to answer any questions you may have

Well, now sit down quietly, and listen to me, sir.
I work with Autocad since 1988 (yes, the Berlin Wall was still standing) at the beginning Vanilla, then Mechanical Desktop and Autosurf.
Since 1999's autumn, I'm Lan admin in a cartographic center, so I struggle with Map releases every damned day.
Unfortunately I may use only 2006 version, because my poor government office has no money to upgrade.
Anyway, Autocad Map can almost everything in Gis environment, except the OP issue, i.e. merging different shapefiles.
As I just wrote in the first post (which you didn't read) you can do that, but it would be a too long process for me and you "gurus", and deadly complicated for the OP.
Instead, his goal is immediately reachable by Quantum_gis, while Mapwindow_gis does it a bit longer.
So we'd be glad to learn something new from you, as well as I'm sure you'll learn here something new from us (e.g. how to link Excel records to Autocad objects, or how to publish a GeoDWF with OD...)

[JeremiahM]

Kyle, I don't mean to hijack your post. Did you get a chance to try that yet?

Novarese, I appreciate your passion. Kyle's fist post states "I manage the survey data for my company, and recently, we've been required to submit in GIS format." which to me means he works in AutoCAD, as most Surveyors do, and needs to publish to a GIS format, in this case .SHP. That said, an external GIS program will not help him as I assume all of his data is in DWG format. I also assume from his first post that he is being told what data needs to be attached to his DWG data for delivery and they have given him the .MDB file. To me it seems the only merging he is doing is DWG objects to external data. The best/only tool for DWG is AutoCAD*. Now if he has Unique ID attributes defined in his DWG objects then yes he could export them to SHP and merge them using another application to the MDB if it also had the matching unique ID's, but that would require the time to learn a new software and it is easily done in Map with these tools.

I think the most important detail here is that these are the Autodesk User Group International forums. Typically folks want to know how to solve problems with the tools they have and that is why they post here. I totally agree with you that sometimes the task is too cumbersome or even impossible with Autodesk tools and our responses should reflect that. In Kyle's case I believe we should work through what he can do in the product he owns and is comfortable with first, then if it is not possible or too hard, give him the other solutions that you have mentioned. I am a huge proponent of free and Open Source tools, but also realize that many companies are barred by there IT/Security staff from using these. This further supports the reason we need to answer from the Autodesk perspective in these forums first.

[Novarese]

All right, J, I'm starting to concur with you: let's try to handle the OP challenge only with Autodesk tools.

@ Kyle
To help you, we need some input data: may you attach here a piece of what you have?