Frequent tipster Leonid Nemirovsky (check out his Better Than Nothing AutoLISP site) sends us a tip for inserting an Excel spreadsheet into an AutoCAD table.

"Initiate the Table command by typing Table on the Command line or selecting Table from the ribbon, a pull-down menu, etc. Select the From a data link radio button in the Insert Table dialog box.

"Then click Launch the Data Link Manager. In the Data Link Manager window, select Create a new Excel Data Link, which will open a window asking you to name the new link.

"After you've entered a name in the empty field, click OK and browse to your Excel file. To browse to the file, click on the ellipsis (the icon with the three dots).

"Once you have found your data file and verified it is correct with the preview window, click OK.

"Then close the Data Link Manager dialog box by clicking OK again.

 "Click OK in the Insert Table dialog box, and you are done."

Notes from Cadalyst Tip Patrol: Spreadsheets and AutoCAD go hand in hand. Many of us use them for both our construction documents and our reports. Why not make sure they are tied together? That way, if the numbers are wrong, at least they are the same in the drawings as in the reports! Working with tables is much easier in Excel than it is in AutoCAD. This process also works in reverse, meaning that if you have a table in AutoCAD, you can send it to an Excel file. Select a table and right-click on it, then select the export option to create a CSV file from it. In the Data Link Manager, you can change the file type from EXL to CSV and create a link to the table you exported. The Data Extraction Tool is very useful too.