Using Excel Drawing tools for Design Sketches

[Simon]

I'm a civil/struct. design engineer.
I use Excel's Drawing Tools (View-Toolbars-Drawing) to illustrate the
calculations and make sketches. I'm convinced that making sketches
with calc's is very important. When I first started making sketches it
took quite a time, but with practice it became much faster. Now it
takes the same time as making a sketch manually. There are a lot of
time saving tricks in Excel Drawing – which could be mastered with
practice. I need some adjustments of Drawing Tools for my purposes…
but I do not know how to do it. Some of these are:
1- scaling; is there a way to make a drawing to scale?
2- printing; when printing circles become elipses;
3- is there a good book (or on the Web) on making drawings with Excel?
4- charting; is it associated with Drawing Tools and how can I use it
for drafting?
5- is there a Group dedicated to drafting on Excel?

Any ideas, suggestions, comments….?

Simon Goykhman,
Toronto
(e-mail address removed)

 

[Jon Peltier]

Simon -

I've used Excel for this, by charting points that outline an object I
wanted drawn precisely. Very tedious. I can only imagine the MS Office
drawing tools are even worse.

The tool I've used frequently for this is Visio, another MS product
you'll have to shell out more cash for. It's kind of a poor man's CAD
program, without the steep learning curve and with the user interface
designed for inhabitants of this planet. The CAD package my colleagues
use at work has half the screen filled with buttons that don't resemble
their functions, and you need a three-button mouse, but there's still no
context menu.

I know of no resources for technical drawing (drafting) in MS Office,
although John Walkenbach has posted some drawings sent to him by an
artist named Debbie Gewand (http://j-walk.com/ss/excel/odd/odd22.htm).

- Jon