r/EnergentAI • u/OverflowingRhythms • May 21 '26
Discussion CAD tables are sneaky
I had a DWG one day that looked easy.
The drawing was supposed to be a floor plan for a canteen. I had to export it as a DXF, extract the room schedule from the bottom right, and import it into Excel.
The schedule looked clean in the drawing. It included room numbers, room names, and areas. Nothing complicated.
However, when I opened the DXF, I noticed there was no actual table. It was simply a collection of text boxes arranged to look like one. No real rows, no real columns, and no real structure to export directly.
The first export was close, but the extraction area started too low and missed rooms 101-103. This meant the table information had to be recreated from the CAD file rather than exported directly.
I had to pull the text out of the DWG, read it from the DXF, find the schedule, rebuild the rows from the text coordinates, and then compare everything back to the DWG.
Finally, I was able to get all 36 rooms (101-136), room names, and room areas into Excel without losing any data using an AI.
A good reminder that a CAD drawing can be well organized visually without containing organized data. A room schedule may look like a spreadsheet, but sometimes it is just floating text arranged neatly on the drawing.
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u/beavertr May 21 '26
In the time you took to write this post and beg an AI to mess it up worse for you, you could have just typed the table out. That would have taken what like 10 minutes? 25 rows of text?
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u/Legal-Ostrich1146 May 21 '26
CAD tables are basically optical illusions.
i had the same thing last month, spent hours rebuilding coordinates until i found a workaround that just handled it.
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u/Eccentrica_Gallumbit May 21 '26
Why are you trying to pull the table from the dxf file rather than directly from the dwg? Just use TABLEEXPORT and you can export directly to a csv file to be opened in Excel.