Subject: Working with other data and programs

Traditional paper drawings serve only as a means of communicating information between the person who created the drawing and the person viewing the drawing. The drawings contain no more information than what is visually imparted by the creator and seen by the viewer.

CADdirect offers rich possibilities for analyzing drawings and attaching additional data to them. For instance, although it may be impractical to count entities in a com­plex paper drawing, this task is simple in CAD. CADdirect can calculate the number of entities in a drawing and compute area and distance.

CAD drawings can also contain information in addition to visible entities. You can attach invisible database information to visible drawing entities and extract the infor­mation for analysis in a database or spreadsheet. (Working with information in a data­base requires a program from a third-party vendor, or you can create your own means of exporting the data in LISP or SDS. Or, you can also use VBA.)

CADdirect_and_manual_1">CADdirect provides in-place editing of Microsoft^® objects, such as those created in Microsoft^® Word and Microsoft^® Excel software programs. In-place editing makes it easy to share data with other users and programs. For example, you can include Intel­liCAD drawings in files created using Microsoft^® Word, and you can insert files cre­ated using Microsoft^® Word into your CADdirect drawings.