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PowerPoint And Volo View
by Ellen
Finkelsten and Geetesh
Bajaj
Introduction
AutoCAD Formats
What's Volo View?
What Happened To WHIP!
Installing Volo View Express
Before You Begin
Step-by-Step
A Gift From Ellen
Presenting Your Slide Show
Disclaimer
Introduction
If you work with technical drawings, you are probably familiar
with Autodesk's AutoCAD, and its related products, such as Autodesk
Architectural Desktop and Mechanical Desktop.
If you also use Microsoft PowerPoint to make presentations to
clients and colleagues, you can now put an AutoCAD drawing directly
into PowerPoint. That's right, the actual drawing, not a JPEG or
other raster image of the drawing. Moreover, using the capabilities
of Autodesk's free Volo View Express, you can zoom and pan the
drawing so your audience can see clearly everything you want to
display, right in the PowerPoint presentation.
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AutoCAD Formats
This is an opportune time to take a closer look at AutoCAD's file
formats. There are basically three formats relevant to the scope
of this article. These are:
DWG: Drawing
DWF: Drawing Web File
DXF: Drawing Interchange Format
Although at least two of these three formats with the exception
of DWF can be opened to view in AutoCAD itself, it would have been
nice to be aware of the existence of a free viewing application.
Enter Volo View Express - which can view all three!
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What's Volo View?
Volo View is Autodesk's viewer for DWG files, which can also view
drawings in the DWF and DXF formats.
Volo View is available in two incarnations. The fully featured
Volo View program includes extensive markup and measuring capabilities
in addition to the basic panning and zooming controls. It's free
subset is called Volo View Express (hereafter VVE) - this lacks
the advanced features of its parent Volo View program - but lets
you open, view, and print AutoCAD drawings.
All Volo View installations also include ActiveX controls which
enable you to view your CAD content in Microsoft's Internet Explorer
browser.
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What Happened To WHIP!
Volo View as a whole supplants WHIP!, the original DWF viewer
- you'll find more information on using WHIP! and PowerPoint here:
PowerPoint And WHIP!
Do bear in mind that WHIP! does not support as many features as
Volo View. Also, newer AutoCAD content, such as drawings originating
from the new AutoCAD 2002 cannot be viewed using WHIP! Nevertheless,
you can still download WHIP! from the Autodesk site.
WHIP's greatest advantage in comparison to VVE is it's download
size - a mere 3.5 MB as compared to VVE's 25 MB
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Installing Volo View Express
To install Volo View Express, go to the Volo
View Express page on Autodesk's Web site and follow the instructions
to download the program. You need to provide your name and email
address.
The VVE setup routine weights at over 25 MB.
It's worth mentioning here that VVE refuses to start on systems
which do not have Internet Explorer 5.01 or higher installed. Even
Windows 98 SE comes pre-built with Internet Explorer 5.0 only -
so you'll need to update your Internet Explorer installation to
match version 5.01 or higher.
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Before You Begin
All the steps below apply not only to DWG files, but to DWF and
DXF files as well. For example, if you use another CAD program,
you can convert a drawing to DXF format and put it in your PowerPoint
presentation. However, we've only tested this method with DXF files
created by AutoCAD.
Now you're ready to insert an AutoCAD drawing into a PowerPoint
presentation. Remember that you need to have PowerPoint (or the
PowerPoint Viewer) and Volo View Express installed on all computers
that you use to create or display your presentation.
Of course, you also need your drawing file - be sure you know
its name and location. If your drawing requires support files,
such as references to other drawings (xrefs) or hyperlinked files,
write down their names and locations. The same applies to font
files.
If you use different computer to create and deliver, double check
the file paths before you present to make sure PowerPoint can still
find your drawing and any other necessary files.
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Step-by-Step
- Open or create a new PowerPoint presentation. Save it in the
same folder as your DWG file.
- In PowerPoint, display the slide where you want to put the
drawing. Right-click any toolbar and click Control Toolbox.
- On the Control Toolbox toolbar, click the More Controls icon.
- Choose 'Autodesk Volo View Control' from the drop-down list.
- On the active slide, drag out a rectangle for the DWF file.
You'll see either a plain rectangle or a rectangle with the Volo
View Express logo.
- Right-click the rectangle and choose Properties. The Properties
window opens.
- Click anywhere in the Custom (top) row. You see an ellipsis
(...) button. Click the button. The Options dialog box
opens.
- On the General tab in the File Name section, click Browse to
choose the drawing file. On the same tab, you can add paths for
support files and font files.
- On the Display tab you can set some color parameters as well
as the projection (parallel or perspective) and shading (wireframe,
flat shaded or Gouraud shaded). Gouraud shading provides
more realistic shading.
- On the Print tab you can set color parameters for printing
the drawing. You can print the drawing from PowerPoint.
- When you're done, click OK to return to the Properties window.
You should see your file listed next to the Src item. Close the
window by clicking its Close box. (If no file appears next to
the Src item, close and reopen the Properties window and the
file will appear.)
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A Gift From Ellen
The following is a note from Ellen:
I thought it would be nice to offer an AutoCAD drawing for
download. The one I've attached isn't the one in the picture,
it's a 2D drawing of an office plan that I feel more comfortable
giving out, given the permissions I got. It's nice for the situation
because the drawing covers a large space and zooming in will
be especially impressive. In fact, there's a phone in one of
the offices and if you zoom in enough, you can read the extension
number on it, all within PowerPoint. Quite nice!
Now, a word about the download - if you were to click the link
below, Internet Explorer may open it through the Volo View Control.
Since we need to actually save the download, right-click the link
below and choose 'Save Target As...' or similar
OfficePlan.dwg (approx. 50
kb)
The same DWG file is also available zipped:
OfficePlan.zip (approx 20
kb)
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Presenting Your Slide Show
First things first: the Volo View Express Control does not remember
the path to your actual drawing if you move the presentation from
one computer to another. So, you'll have to spend a minute or so
to reestablish the paths using the techniques detailed above.
In PowerPoint, view the slide with the AutoCAD drawing in slide
show view. After a brief pause (possibly embarrassing in a formal
presentation environment), you see the drawing, along with horizontal
and vertical scrollbars. You can use the scrollbars to pan through
the drawing.
 Besides
scrolling, you can right click to use the VVE menu, where you can
do the following:
- Pan and Zoom.
- Turn layers on and off.
- Display named (saved) views.
- Switch to ClearScale (gray scale) or black & white.
- Print (just the drawing, not the slide)
Other options may appear, depending on how the drawing was saved.
Here you see the model zoomed in.
This could make for a very nice presentation, zooming in and out
and panning around to show your drawing. It's certainly much more
interactive and interesting than what you could do with a static
JPEG!
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Disclaimer
This is just an experiment. No support can be provided for the
techniques listed here. Also, I don't suppose either Microsoft
or Autodesk would offer support on this subject.
However, newsgroups at Microsoft and Autodesk are well visited
and intelligent interactions are possible on the forums.
microsoft.public.powerpoint
Autodesk
Discussions
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