Organizing and Refining Extracted Data

The Refine Data page of the Data Extraction wizard lets you modify the structure of the data extraction table to organize and refine data before exporting it to a table or to an external file.

Clicking the columns header lets you sort the entries based in that column values. Sequential clicks will switch between ascending and descending order.

You can do the following:

• Combine identical rows. Groups identical rows in the table and updates the Count column accordingly.
• Show count column. Displays or hides the Count column.
• Show name column. Displays or hides the Name column.

Link External Data displays the Link External Data dialog box. Allows you to link external Microsoft Excel files.

Full Preview displays the preview of the table in a dialog box.

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

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.