EZCad - Excel

[Zlatko Kursar]

Did anyone try to use data in Excel for marking?
I can't get field name when I open excel file.

[Kev Williams]

I've tried, no luck. No help in the manual either.

What DOES work is notepad-- Just take the column of text you want, copy it and paste it in notepad. Now save it in 'my documents' -that will probably be the folder EZcad will default to...

Now instead of 'Excel', choose 'txt'. Find the file and enter it.
If you want to see if it imports all lines, check "read all lines". when you hit ok, the screen will list all lines as they are in notepad. If it looks good, go back to the variable lists window at the lower right of the screen, click on the filename, then click "modify". When you go back to the text options, 'read all lines' should now NOT be checked- just click ok and when you return line 1 from your notepad should show up. In the options, the start line and increments feature does work! It can help save time if your job is 3 lines of text, like name/address/city-state... All of these can be stacked together in notepad. Set your 3 separate lines of text, and use each line as a variable. The same notepad file can now be used for all 3 lines, for the name line the 'Line No.' will be 1, increment will be 3. (all increments will be 3) - start the address as Line No. 2, the city as 3.

As you engrave, the variables automatically advance once the last engraving is done, and what's to engrave next will be on the screen, wysiwyg.. It works great!

FAIR WARNING about the "AUTO RESET" -If this is NOT checked, once you're done with the last variable(s), it will start over from the beginning! This can be BAD if you're engraving customer parts, and you have 3 different jobs to do on them.. if you're not keeping count, you'll start engraving duplicates! It's ALWAYS a good idea to CHECK the AUTO RESET box!

BUT BEWARE! (there's always something!) -- When it resets, your VARIABLE text will not show up, but the default word "TEXT" will appear. This will obviously mean the list is over, but if you're not watching the screen and start the laser , then you'll engrave "TEXT" ... ;)

[Zlatko Kursar]

Thanks Kev for information. I know that Notepade work but I also see on youtube that excel work and I was think that I do something wrong.

[Chris J Anderson]

The excel you saw working was probably a .csv type file. Means comma separated values, and is text only.
A csv file doesnt store cell sizes or font types or colours, it just stores text.

Try this...
1. Open a new notepad file.
2. Type Test1,test2
Do this exactly as i have shown.
3. Save the file as anything you like then close it.
4. In My Computer, rename the file extension, change it from.txt to .csv
5. then open it :)

This is a simple example of a csv file.

[Kev Williams]

One problem-- EZcad will ONLY open txt or xls files, no option to open csv, or xlsx for that matter-
If you have one column of text in Excel, you can save it as unicode text and it'll open using the 'txt' option. Note that 'tab delimited' txt won't work--
however, if you have more than one column, then unicode doesn't work but tab delimited does- however, it just places the next column of text to the right of the first column, how exactly to make that useful in EZcad I'm not sure - yet ;)

[Gary Hair]

I just tried an excel file as well as a tab delimited file - both worked perfectly! The one caveat - the Excel file must be "97-2003" or it won't work. EZcad was made in the dark ages and won't recognize newer files from either Excel or Illustrator but it has no problem with older files.