Use Excel (or Word) Info to Fill-in Attribute Info

[MichaelMarshall]

We have several Excel doc's (and maybe a Word doc or two) that users regularly fill out as part of their tasks.

There are several pieces of information in those doc's that we'd like to capture as Attributes in WC.

Rather than have the users manually enter the Attribute during document creation or check-in in WC, is there a way to have WC "detect" the presence of information in Named cells, and use that information to populate an Attribute?

Right now we have the users check-in the document, and manually specify the info for the selected Attributes in the Set Attributes screen. Not only is this duplicating work, it also presents an opportunity for the actual Excel document to say one thing, while the Attributes say another. I'd like to leverage that data that's already in the Excel doc!

Through searching, I found a pretty good blurb from someone about how to map the IBAs to Named cells in Excel...but this only appears to work when Attributes are already established for an Excel doc and you want to get an Excel file to "update" to show the values of those Attributes in the Excel file. Its outbound info only, not inbound info creation.

Thanks!

[MikeLockwood]

Windchill Desktop Integration fully supports this - and it's easy and straight-forward to set up. Essentially it allows a table or header / footer in a Word document or Excel workbook to act like a parametric Pro/E drawing format title block.

The only caveat (and what has kept us from even considering using it even though we'd very much like to) is that the attributes are not updated in the file unless you force all users to download via a Java Applet. If anyone downloads via HTML, you cannot trust that the attribute values are current.

So far no response from PTC except that you need to force the use of Java Applets for ALL DOWNLOADS. Presumably the way to do this is to set the related preference and lock it. Still, in a regulated environment, we're not sure that we can fully defend the values in an audit, and so have not used DTI.

[tweathe]

Mike,



You should use the Desktop integration tools.







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[ScottKeller]

We have done alot of work mapping attributes from WindChill into Excel and Word but have not figured out a way to get anything from Excel/Word into the attributes without using the DTI options of Edit and Check in on theWindChill menu in MS Office docs. If someone knows a way to be able to change a field in word or a cell in excel that would trigger a change in an attribute I would definitely like to know that also...