One of the amazing things about working with Grasshopper is the ability to generate lots of information, a key part of Building Information Modeling. However, it can sometimes be difficult to get that information out of Grasshopper in an organized form. Damien Alomar’s work with GH and Excel served as the initial inspiration for this exploration, but in this example the connection between Grasshopper and Excel is extended to allow more control of how the data is written to the Excel file.
Information is sent to Excel through the use of a VB script component. A panel component is used to specify the names for each column which are attached sequentially to the column# inputs. If a column# input is skipped then the column name is applied to the next available column# input. There are other inputs which allow the connection to be turned off, data to be cleared from the current excel file, column names turned off, and the ability to specify which row and column to use as the start position.
A possible application for this component would be takeoffs of a panel parameters for a facade system. In this simple example a facade is created from panels of a standard size, but some are trimmed due to edge conditions and there are a range of 9 colors being used. All of this information can be tracked within Grasshopper and then sent to Excel in a desired format.
This GH definition was created using version 0.0.6.59: Download Excel-exporter, 11.79 kB
Obligatory disclaimer: the author does not guarantee that these parametric models are bug-free or that they will solve all of your problems. If you find bugs or have suggestions for improvements, please let us know.
Nice work on this tool! Thanks for sharing.
One comment: even if column names aren’t being displayed, a name needs to be present for the data to be linked.
I’ll look into fixing that and repost once complete.
How to make it go beyond 9 colums?
You would need to add inputs using the Input manager and then open up the VB component and add those same variables. When I created this I only had the need to send over a few columns of information so I never put in the time to set up the component so that each path would represent a column. If or when I get to that I’ll repost the component.