Watch this video to learn how to Import coordinates from Excel to ZWCAD:
ZWCAD users often need to import MS Excel spreadsheets, considered as tables containing spatial data including coordinates and specific information, as ZWCAD Point or Block Entities
Although you can access Excel or Access files in ‘Spatial Manager’ by connecting through the Windows ODBC standard (Open Database Connectivity), it is usually faster to export from Excel to a CSV file and take advantage of the Enhanced ASCII data provider
Spatial Manager™ for ZWCAD and ASCII point data
All products in the Spatial Manager™ suite include, among many other access tools, a powerful ASCII data provider to read plain text files (CSV, ASC, XYZ, etc.), which allows you to access Excel tables that contain point type Features
Import coordinates from Excel to ZWCAD
Excel coordinates and ZWCAD
Most applications in the market developed to Import coordinates from Excel to ZWCAD, operate using only exported basic format ASCII files, such as XYZ, PNEZ or UPT files, and manage only coordinates but not related data and rarely perform a coordinate transformation
The coordinate transformation is an important issue to consider because a lot of coordinate data comes from GPS devices or similar. Thus the coordinate data is formatted using Latitude and Longitude values in Excel and the users usually need to import the data to projected coordinates into the DWG drawing
Example: Import coordinates from Excel to ZWCAD
Scenario: importing into a ZWCAD drawing of a city a large number of streetlights from an Excel spreadsheet, which includes the coordinates of these streetlights, using a Latitude/Longitude system (CRS: WGS84 / EPSG: 4326), and the related streetlights data
Although Spatial Manager™ for ZWCAD can import the streetlights as Point Entities, and we will get all related data as Extended Entity Data (EED), we can also use a Block definition in the drawing to import them. This Block definition includes some Attribute definitions whose values will also be imported from their corresponding data in Excel
The target drawing is defined using the CRS UTM30-ETRS89 (EPSG: 25830) so that the coordinates of the source streetlights will be transformed from EPSG 4326 to this CRS inside the import process
