Shareware Review - September 99

Better WMF

Simplifying the process of pasting AutoCAD into MS Office Products

By Dave Zinn.

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, obviously).  Until we started using Office 97 several users would paste a plot file (*.plt) into Word or Powerpoint.  For some reason, which I am not entirely clear on, 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.  This method forced you to do all kinds of extra effort to make it look right, in other words, change all the colors involved.

The solution to both of these issues is "Better WMF."  (WMF, in case you don't know, stands for "Windows Meta File.")  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)
• And many more configurable options...

Better WMF (BWMF) can run one 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.  BWMF is the only way that I know of to do this.  If you load BWMF directly from Windows, you cannot merge paperspace and all viewports.

Of course BWMF comes in several AutoCAD flavors, R13, R14, & R15 (AutoCAD 2000), and seperate *.rx files are available for each version in one download.  BWMF 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).

Main Page: http://www.furix.com/
Download Page: http://www.furix.com/download/index.htm
Pricing Page: http://www.furix.com/pricing/index.htm

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Revised: Wednesday, 30. November 2005.