AutoCAD Cleanup Tip

I have been doing some consulting for a company that has mixed AutoCAD & AutoCAD LT releases. They also employ temporary help and outside services. Needless to say their drawings are comprised of (being kind here) less than desirable objects and created with less than desirable techniques... and while talking them in to upgrading all of their licenses to AutoCAD 2007 (as well as taking upgrade training)... one thing I noticed was a very common problem. EXPLODE !!!

Since they have older releases of AutoCAD being used inside & out, they were saving back to an older release DWG format... and also to deal with new (or newer, > AutoCAD 2005 objects) such as TABLES, many of the tables were not tables, they were once tables and were exploded in place and edited.

If for whatever reason someone explodes a TABLE... (and after you hunt them down and kill them) running the Express Tool OVERKILL helps to clean up all the individual lines... but this only helps to clean up the lines.

If you need to get the information back into a TABLE, then try using another Express Tool TXT2MTEXT. Make sure to change the settings for the TXT2MTEXT command (TXT2MTEXT or T2M is my command alias, and then hitting an extra ENTER will bring up the settings dialog box... you want to enable the Sort top-down option and disabling the Create word-wrap MText option.

Now use TXT2MTEXT on each column of information... and then you can edit that newly created MTEXT, select all the text (CTRL+A) and copy/paste into Excel. (repeat for each column) When finished it's easy to paste that back into AutoCAD from Excel as a TABLE.

This final process has been covered, and done so at:
http://www.cadapult-software.com/tutorials/excel.htm

- Enjoy