Excel and Autocad?

[Jack_O'neill]

Greetings Earthlings.

 

Way back in the stone age when Mechanical Desktop was king (anybody remember that?)  we quite often would link an excel spreadsheet to a drawing to drive the dimensions for various bits of tooling.

 

For instance, more than 2 decades ago I worked for a company that had  a machine that bent copper tubing to make 180 degree return bends.  it bent the tube and cut the ends the same length with a flying saw...all at a frightening rate of speed.  To do a diameter and or radius change on this machine we had to make 208 pieces of tooling. It took some trial and error for about 3 months but we finally got it down to where all we had to do was enter the tube diameter, the bend radius and the overall length in a spreadsheet, hit the button that started the macro and it would update all 208 drawings.

 

My question is this...can this be done in Autocad 2020?  We have a bunch of very similar parts that get 3dprinted and every time we get a new one, we wind up modeling the whole thing again.