Link External Data Dialog Box¶
The Link External Data dialog box lets you link data from a Microsoft Excel file to the data extraction table.
Data Link
Select a data link
Displays a list of established links to external data files. To attach a new Microsoft Excel file to the drawing, click Select data link.
Open data link manager 
Displays the Data Link Manager dialog box. You can create new data links to Microsoft Excel files that can be used as presets.
Data matching
Drawing data column
Displays a list of extracted property columns.
External data column
Displays a list of column names from the linked Microsoft Excel file.
Match
Performs a match check between a drawing data column and an external Microsoft Excel file data column by comparing the data in the specified drawing data key column and the external data key column. The match is successful if the data is unique across all rows in the external data key columns, and there is at least one data match between the drawing data and the data in the spreadsheet. If these conditions are not met, a warning message is displayed.
Case sensitive
Takes letter case into account when comparing data in the drawing columns with data in the externally linked columns.
Ignore the prefix and suffix white space
When enabled, the data match validation process ignores the blank spaces in front of and after the entries in the compared columns.
Additional external data columns for data extraction table
Select external data columns to include
Lists the columns from the data extraction table by order in which they appear in the external Microsoft Excel file. You can specify the columns to include at the end of the data extraction table.
Use top row of external data as column names
When enabled, uses the top row of data in the data link as the column name for the linked data. When disabled, columns are labeled Column 1, Column 2 and so on.
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