How To Avoid A Bug Splat When Importing From Excel
-
Hello,
I've been having some unfortunate experiences with importing Excel into my Layout drawings. I like to use spreadsheets, especially for things like structural calculations, but on several occasions, the import would get all scrambled, and then I tried to re-size it, the characters would collapse into a very tiny mess of characters, and then I would get a bug splat shortly thereafter. This last time, I noticed that I had some inconsistencies in my font styles and sizes within the imported data. Once I corrected that, everything worked great. And, although this doesn't seem to cause a bug splat, I found that merged cells don't import very well either.
So, two lessons learned: (1) Don't try to import a bunch of mongrel fonts (I hate inconsistent fonts anyway, so maybe this "helps" me) and (2) don't try to import merged cells.
Hope this is helpful.
Frank Borik
-
At this time the only text files that LayOut is officially intended to take are RTFs. I think you've hit on a couple of points but you'll probably get better results if you copy your table from Excel and paste it in a blank Word doc. Most projects I do in LayOut involve at least one table. The data is exported from SketchUp as a CSV file which I massage and rearrange in Excel before going to Word. I dislike the appearance of the straight tables so I convert tables to tab-separated text. Usually I do a few other things in Word including pasting in some boilerplate text before saving as an RTF file. This file imports into LayOut flawlessly and as long as I remember not to try editing it in LO directly, I can always open it for editing in Word.
It seems like a convoluted path but for me it is workable. I've done so many of them now that the steps are sort of a process I can do quite rapidly.
Hello! It looks like you're interested in this conversation, but you don't have an account yet.
Getting fed up of having to scroll through the same posts each visit? When you register for an account, you'll always come back to exactly where you were before, and choose to be notified of new replies (either via email, or push notification). You'll also be able to save bookmarks and upvote posts to show your appreciation to other community members.
With your input, this post could be even better 💗
Register Login
Advertisement