Importing data from Excel Spreadsheet

[bethelcad370537]

Hi all,

I have a co-worker here who would like to have a drawing of our campus map that contains the location of all the light poles on campus. What he would like to see is something along the lines of being able to click on the light and have something like a quick properties box that contains all the information he needs about that light. The closest I have been able to do is to have a "semi-dynamic" table that can be imported to the drawing (needs to be manually refreshed whenever there is a change) as well as a simple hyperlink that opens the entire spreadsheet rather than the specific row. Right now, the worst case is that he has do some cross-referencing on that light (which is about 100 lights) but would prefer the single row "quick properties" idea. I've heard that for something like this, Map3D is the way to go...but I'm not sure how to go about that.

Thanks for all the help,
-Bethel CAD

[Jmurphy]

Yes Map3D can do what you want. One way is by using Object Data tables to hold the data That data can then be viewed in the property palette. Another way is to convert the light poles to a SDF format file and use data connect to bring it into your map. This way there is a table that contains all the data of the lights and when selecting the lights it will highlight the record in the table.

[bethelcad370537]

I've never really tried using Object Data tables before in MAP...once I create one like this tutorial says, what would I do from there?

[Jmurphy]

After you create the Table use the adeattachdata command and select one of the lights in the dwg, then just fill in the fields for that light. (Make sure you press the ENTER key after each field and not the tab key).
Once you attach the data to an object click on it and look in the property palette, that info is there at the bottom. Also you can use that data to style the lights for example all Mercury Vapor to be red in color and all Soduim lights to b blue in color. The style can be seperate from the autocad layers the objects reside on. There's a lot you can do with the object data once you have it created.