Clearwater, Florida, USA —It's summertime here in Florida and that often means sweltering temperatures, long lines at Disney World and bad tan lines. Rather than venture outdoors, I find myself sorting through my e-mail inbox to see what users are saying about using Microsoft Office Importer. Just so you know, Microsoft Office Importer is Axiom's most popular utility in terms of total number of users, probably because it enables MicroStation users to import and link Excel spreadsheet and Word document data into MicroStation with ease, reliability and exact formatting. Equipment schedules, bills of materials, tabular data, construction notes and the like can all be pasted once and will stay up-to-date in your design file — even when the spreadsheet changes - with no further user interaction, beyond opening that design file.

All of the comments that you are about to read are unsolicited accounts about Microsoft Office Importer from real Axiom customers.

David N. Rackmales of the US Army Corps of Engineers said, "[Microsoft] Office Importer is probably the most intuitive, reliable and user-friendly program or add-on I've ever used. Training for the users here takes about a minute."

I believe it! Aside from being easy to use, Microsoft Office Importer is also a huge time-saver when it comes to importing Word documents and Excel spreadsheet data.

Abe Arollo of Aztec Engineering declares, "Without Microsoft Office Importer, importing spreadsheets was a two-step process that took two people (a designer and a CAD drafter) a minimum of two hours on a simple Excel spreadsheet to a maximum of five hours on a complex spreadsheet."

Tom Orner of EMCS, Incorporated also noticed Microsoft Office Importer's time-saving benefits. He remarks, "This is an amazing tool. It easily saved us 75% to 90% of the time spent on importing our quantity sheets."

Those savings of time do add up! One customer reported that, as a result of using Microsoft Office Importer, his company "saves $20,000 per year."

Microsoft Office Importer also allows users to control almost any aspect of the document or spreadsheet data that they have imported into their design file. Color, weight, level, style, font, text size and other attributes can all be modified in Microsoft Office Importer's settings. With these settings, users can ensure that their documents and spreadsheets will be imported to their exact specifications.

Another feature of Microsoft Office Importer is that it maintains the formatting of an Excel spreadsheet or Word document when either is imported into MicroStation. For example, text in the spreadsheet that is vertical remains vertical when imported into MicroStation. The ability to modify symbology and maintain formatting makes Microsoft Office Importer an extremely valuable tool for many MicroStation users.

Greg Mullins of Mullins & Associates claims, "Before [Microsoft Office] Importer, [the engineers] had to retype all their spreadsheets and Word documents in MicroStation. Now they simply import the text with perfect formatting."

Thanks to everyone who wrote to me with all your comments! It's feedback like that and customer input that drive our product development here at Axiom, so keep it coming! I just want to add, while e-mails are nice, a "YouTube" (www.youtube.com) testimonial about how Microsoft Office Importer saves you time would be spectacular!