Excel to Sketchup

Hello everyone,

I’m trying to do an automatisation from excel to sketchup.

To make it simple I have several objects that I want to positioned in sketchup.

The objects remain the same (there is no change of dimensions within those objects), the only values which I want to pilot from Excel are the positioning of these objects (and their copies).

In summary I try to send values from Excel cells towards a dynamic component and more exactly towards attributes of this dynamic component.

I do not know exactly where to begin, but I dare to hope that there is a plugin to do that (my searches gave nothing).

Anybody would have an idea or even a beginning of a track ?

This sounds like less of a Dynamic Component project and more of a Ruby API project.
With the ruby api, you can control the positioning of most anything as well as add attribution to most anything.
Once all your objects are positioned, you can also extract attribution information via ruby.

http://extensions.sketchup.com/en/search/site/excel

Excel can output data separated value files like CSV (comma separated etc.)
Or space or TAB separated values in XYZ format.
Then, there are importer plugins that can import these “point cloud” files.

This is all manual.


If you are looking for automation, then you must use the SketchUp Ruby API as Chris says,
and the WIN32OLE object to access an external Excel process. (This has been discussed many times in the Ruby API category here, and the Developers forum on SketchUcation.com.)

There is an example of accessing Excel from Ruby in the WIN32OLE class Ruby documentation.
(Note that this is Windows platform only.)

This is a very steep learning curve as the internals of the Dynamic Components extension are not documented. (It is basically internal SketchUp proprietary intellectual property.)

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Ok, that is what most people say so i’ll take a look at ruby

Thank you a lot. I’m begining my learning in ruby and your links will surely help me.

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