Loft Using Data From Excel

Now let's create a loft across sketches on two different planes. First Select the YZ-Plane and change the Points to Add to the five points shown in the screen shot below. Note that the first and last points are the same, which means that the lines will create a closed figure (a square in this case).

Click Import to add the lines to a new sketch on the YZ-Plane. The Sketch or Plane portion of the window will be refreshed and the new sketch will be listed.

Next, go back to Alibre Design and insert a new plane that is offset 2 inches from the YZ-Plane.

When you switch back to Point Import Wizard, you'll notice that the change you just made is not automatically reflected in the Sketch or Plane area. (This is due to a technical flaw in the way Alibre Design attempts to inform other applications of what it's doing.)

To see the plane you added, refresh the part list in Point Import Wizard by selecting Refresh Part List from the Tools menu.

Now open up a Microsoft Excel spread sheet that has point data. In this case it's a simple spreadsheet that contains all the coordinates required to draw a 4-by-4 square. Select only the point data (the range B4:C7 in this example) and copy that data to the clipboard (Ctrl-C).

Switch back to Point Import Wizard, delete any text that may already be in the Points to Add text box, and paste the data you copied from Excel (Ctrl-V). Note that the columns are separated by tabs.

Add the first point again to the end of the list so that a line will be drawn from the last point back to the first. You don't need to add a tab between the columns. In fact the Point Import Wizard is fairly forgiving in this respect; it will ignore leading and trailing white space, parentheses, brackets, braces, greater-than and less-than symbols, and forward slashes, and will accept as delimiters a comma, semicolon, colon, space, tab, or pipe (vertical line). It will also ignore empty lines and lines that it cannot parse as a pair of coordinates. For example, the data shown below is perfectly acceptable.

Be sure to select the new plane (Plane<1>) as shown above and click Import. You'll end up with two figures on two different planes separated by two inches.

Next, in Alibre Design, use the Loft Boss to create the loft feature.