MAKING SCHEDULE TABLES FOR LO

keea1111 · 7 Jun 2010, 04:59

HI,

Does anyone have any experience with making, say, a window schedule table for LO. I am thinking that a template could be made in LO and saved in scrapbooks, yet inserting text doesn't move within the table like an excel document would, so that became the problem. I tried creating a table in Word and importing it in as a PDF, but that also didn't work if I want to use it as a template to fill text in in LO. Does anyone know the best approach for this, as I'd really like to figure this out in making my construction drawings..much thanks, Keea

danbig · 7 Jun 2010, 23:05

Support for tables in LayOut is not that great, in my experience.

What I've done when I need a table is create a text box, give it a stroke and/or fill, and then copy it and align all the copies to look like a table.

It's limited in what you can do (think filling out a digital form rather than having a table in a MS word environment).

keea1111 · 8 Jun 2010, 04:28

Maybe I should make and edit the whole table from Word and then import it in when it is complete. Would this sound easier than you suggestion? Still open to trying anything in this regard..thanks,

danbig · 9 Jun 2010, 06:03

If you have the same experience I've had, you'll be frustrated trying to paste a table from word.

The alignment will be off, especially if you have cells with wrapped text in it.

I have had luck pasting very simple tables directly from excel. Here are a few points that seem to contribute to a "clean" paste into LayOut:

Make the cells equal sizes, in both dimensions.
Give the table a simple outline around all the cells
Format all aspects of the text prior to pasting (typeface, font size, etc..)
Don't try to edit the table after it's been pasted into LayOut

Good luck! Please share if you come up with a better way to do tables.

DavidBoulder · 9 Jun 2010, 15:52

Would be great if this could somehow be tied in with Google docs. Ideal workflow would be to be able to paste a selection from a Google docs spreadsheet and have a live link between that and the Layout file.

If you want to edit the table, a double click could launch the google docs file.

tim · 10 Jun 2010, 03:28

I simply export from Pages/Numbers/whatever as pdf and import the pdf into a text box.

keea1111 · 10 Jun 2010, 04:39

Yes, this suggestions seems like it could work very well. How does one go about with a request like this to the Google Sketch Up programmers? That would be a very helpful addition...

bjanzen · 10 Jun 2010, 11:16

Um... you just did.

DavidBoulder · 10 Jun 2010, 15:47

By the way Barry, just looking at the Google Docs drawing tools, looks like a simplified version of Layout's drawings tools. While I can certainly share my presentations by saving them to PDF and uploading to web, it would be nice to have a "publish to Google Doc's Drawing document" button. The nice thing about that is much of the content would be editable by collaborators using the Google Doc drawing tools.

Similarly being able to import Google Docs Drawings would be nice. Of course if You had saved a Layout File to Google Doc then the model viewports would have been converted to png/jpg and then when you bring it back to Layout it would still be a png/jpg, wouldn't turn back into what it was to start with; but I'm thinking more of a one way workflow, although I could see pushing an updated version of the viewport back up from Layout to Google Docs.

Then it would be nice to be able to hyperlink from the Google Doc png/jpg image of a model to that model in 3DWH.

David

Gaieus · 12 Jun 2010, 09:16

Hi David,

Don1t forget that with GDocs you can also make presentations similar to PowerPoint and watch/present them online.

Certainly a to-and-fro compatibility between different Google products would be nice. I could also imagine embedding videos into LO presentations and even exported PDF files (as you can embed videos into PDF1s now).