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Use AutoCAD Drawings in Office Documents With Ease

Dave Zinn 

Cutting and pasting between applications was meant to be a major plank in the Windows platform. However it takes a third-party application to paste AutoCAD drawings into Office documents with quality results. At my company, we often have a need to paste AutoCAD drawings or snippets of AutoCAD drawings into Word (for releasable documents) and Powerpoint (for presentations). Until we started using Office 97, several users would paste a plot file (*.PLT) into Word or Powerpoint. For some reason, which I don't entirely understand, that no longer works in Office 97. Other users would just run a "Control C" and select AutoCAD entities (oh sorry, make that "objects," I forgot), then paste them into place. To make this method work with any degree of satisfaction you were forced to change all the colors involved with significant additional effort to make it look right.

A typical copy and paste using the Windows clipboard. Even though AutoCAD 2000 allows you to set the screen color to white for clipboard operations, white lines also stay white, making them invisible. Better WMF makes them black.

The same drawing copied and pasted using Better WMF. The image was cropped to extents in the process. 

The solution to both of these issues is an application out of The Netherlands called "Better WMF" (the WMF part stands for "Windows Meta File" a hybrid Windows image format). Here are some of the steps that are simplified in the procedure of pasting AutoCAD clips into Word or Powerpoint: 

• Crop the picture size to the extents of the entities you selected Remove the background color 

• Assign widths to all lines via a pc2 file, if desired 

• Merge paperspace and all viewports into one picture (only when run from AutoCAD), if desired 

• Preset the size of the pasted picture (optionally relative to your drawing scale)

There are also several other configurable options.

The Options dialog shows many of the controls you can set when using Better WMF. 

Better WMF can run either of two ways. You can run it directly in Windows, or load it as an ARX program in AutoCAD. I recommend running it from AutoCAD by automatically loading the ARX program via the ACAD.RX file. This method allows you to paste paperspace entities and viewports all at once. Better WMF is the only way that I know of to do this. If you load Better WMF directly from Windows, you cannot merge paperspace and all viewports. 

Better WMF comes in several AutoCAD flavors, R13, R14, and AutoCAD 2000. Separate *.RX files are available for each version in one download. Better WMF is a robust product that I don't mind recommending. Really, the only draw back is it's price. At US$100 per seat, it is a bit pricey, however relief comes in buying multiple copies or even a site license (which is probably the best deal). 

Dave Zinn 

Originally published on the Professional AutoCAD Users Group website. Re-published with permission.

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