Importing text ex word, spreadsheet etc...?

This is hopeless…
You can see the problem - the formatting of the text, which displays fine in the rhino notepad, doesn’t translate to the actual screen.
Surely, in 2016, there has to be a simple way of importing text, a table, a spreadsheet into rhino?
To get this far, i have had to paste the text to notepad, then format it again with tab stops, and then paste to rhino from there…and it still doesn’t work.
Ive saved out of word as a PDF, then imported the PDF into rhino - it doesn’t bring the text in.

i have a old copy of Visual Cadd, which deals with this stuff via OLE, and its great - you can even double click the object to re-dit it in the original program…

Does anyone have a solution to this probem I am not seeing? (using an image of the text on a picture frame is not a “solution”)

cheers
rabbit

Are you using the same font in Rhino as you are in Notepad?

Yes Dale - I just re-checked. The font in both cases is Arial…

Thanks
rabbit

Arial is a proportionally spaced font, thus nearly impossible to get “stuff” to align in a tabular way. You might consider using a fixed space font. If you can’t find a fixed space font you like, try inserting text one column at a time.

Well, I tried courier new - same thing.
If you can get a tabbed set of text in from word or excel to rhino, keeping the layout, I’d sure like to see it, and have you describe how you did it…

Cheers
rabbit

If your text includes tab characters, try converting them to spaces before importing/converting to Rhino text…

Well, its better, but you see its still not right - theres a mis-match in the “pipe” & “SectionA” columns…

Thanks for your help, but surely it cant be this hard? Formatting with spaces is not really a “solution” is it?
We just need to be able to paste a set of cells from excel, or a table from word etc, and have rhino eat it.

cheers
rabbit

The attached text file produced the attached 3dm file. I have both Notepad and Rhino using the Consolas font.

Is this what you want?

Rabbit.txt (612 Bytes)
Rabbit.3dm (23.9 KB)

Not @rabbit here… Just restating what he wrote…

… and agreeing with that.

Well, there was this (look down towards the bottom of the thread)…

But the referenced web page now appears to be blank…

Which, of course, only adds additional support to the argument…

Thanks Dale -
Sure - that is the result I want.
In this instance, with this little amount of text, it could be argued this is a solution.

I see grasshopper can probably be made to do this kind of thing.
However, I can’t even spell grasshopper, and it’s just a shame that something so basic has not been hooked up in native rhino after all these years.

As far as I know, windows OLE was created just for this very purpose; it certainly worked flawlessly in a previous cad program I used to use.
Why does rhino not support this windows feature?

cheers
rabbit

I’m not sure I can answer this. I do know that there are currently 6954 open issues (features, wishes, bugs) for Rhino for Windows.

There are already two issues related to this:

http://mcneel.myjetbrains.com/youtrack/issue/RH-15268
http://mcneel.myjetbrains.com/youtrack/issue/RH-3646

Dale, RH-15268 is ‘closed for public’.

Yea sorry, it includes some private information. Basically it says this:

Import and/or link Excel table (this is actually 1 on our list right now as the biggest feature AutoCad has that Rhino does not for 2d drafting)

2 Likes

Import and/or link Excel table (this is actually #1 on our list right now as the biggest feature AutoCad has that Rhino does not for 2d drafting)

More than 3 years have passed…I really need this feature badly. Any idea when it will be available?

1 Like

It sounds like we’ll be waiting for a very long time unless ‘we go out there and sort it ourselves’, have a read of the following thread

Yes this is disappointing but not entirely unexpected. I’ll see if I can get something to work in Grasshopper. I have never written a line of code in my life but I am finding myself turning to Grasshopper more and more often for solutions that involve instancing and manipulating things that were created outside of Grasshopper’s toolset.

I haven’t got time to learn or write a line of code :rofl::rofl:

Hi,
You might be interested in our plugin, which lets you create/import tables from csv, xls or xlsx files:
Demo video here: Table for rhino Demo - YouTube
More details and download: Tables – TomKod