4/5/2021 Linking Excel Data Into Navisworks – Part 5 Wrapping Up – RVIT

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Linking Excel Data Into Navisworks – Part 5

Wrapping Up

POSTED ON JANUARY 26, 2017JANUARY 24, 2018 BY JASON KUNKEL POSTED IN TIPTAGGED
EXCEL, EXPORT TO EXCEL, IMPORT FROM EXCEL, NAVISWORKS, SQL
Time to put a nice bow on this whole package. We did a full round trip of exporting data from
Navisworks, adding some more data, and then bringing it back in to the Navisworks file. Here are some
general grab bag thoughts and resources you can use.

This is a really powerful addition to the Navisworks solution. Having the ability to embed straight up
data into the model should open a lot of potential opportunities for leveraging existing data in other
formats.

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4/5/2021 Linking Excel Data Into Navisworks – Part 5 Wrapping Up – RVIT

The connection to your Excel file is live, as far as I can tell. Every time I made a change in Excel and then
saved it, that change was immediately reflected in my Navisworks property (or at least I had to deselect
the item and then select it again, and then I saw the new data). One thing to remind you about: watch
out for your cell data type on the Excel file. If the column is “General” and you put a number in,
Navisworks might add some decimal places to it. And a weird hiccup is when your entire column is all
numbers except for a single cell. That cell’s value won’t get applied in Navisworks. It’s like one of those
cells defines the data type and if it finds one that doesn’t match, Navisworks ignores it. I don’t have a lot
of proof for this theory, but so far it holds up.

These connections can be exported and imported if you set it up once and need to export it around. I
imagine you would have to be careful about the ODBC driver se ings hopping from one PC to another,
but it is an option.

And you can use any other ODBC connection that you want. MSSQL obviously comes to mind, but so
does MySQL, and I’m confident many other web based data sources can expose their data through
ODBC. Frankly, as a nerd, i’m ge ing excited about the possibilities.

A quick link here to W3 School’s SQL page (h p://www.w3schools.com/sql/sql_select.asp), if you want

to start diving into refining your SQL statements; there is a lot of power and potential there that you
could do when you are building your data links. My example is a very specific one to one link, but you
could easily make a connection that populates data for all your windows, or all materials of a specific
type. You just need to adjust your SQL statement and make sure the data in your data source fits.

I hope you got some good information out of this series, and if you are using a Navisworks data link to
pull in some data that is useful and exciting to you, we would love to hear about it below.

3 thoughts on “Linking Excel Data Into Navisworks – Part 5

Wrapping Up”

1. Pingback: Linking Excel Data Into Navisworks – Part 5 Wrapping Up - Revit news
2. Pingback: Weekly Roundup – 2017.04 | The BIMsider
3. MARCH 27, 2017 AT 4:31 AM
Michal says:
Great tips, finally my internal connection to SQL server works perfectly.

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