I was testing the Excel connector and looked at the documentation and I found a part of it discussed advanced workflows of receiving complex data and models in Excel and only found that it is similar to the Grasshopper Schema Builder. I wanted to check a few things regarding this.
Which models are best received in Excel? For example, is a Rhino model easier to receive than a Revit model?
I have tried receiving Revit models in Excel and I got the data flattened into two rows. Is it possible to then send this data back into Speckle and have it be the same model that was sent from Revit? I have tried so far but didn’t manage to find a way for it to work.
If not in Revit, then is the above possible from other software? And if yes, which ones would be possible?
Additionally, does the Excel connector support Rhino data? I have been trying to receive Rhino data in Excel but I keep getting the operation cancelled without it receiving anything.
It’s a good question. In theory, the Excel connector reads Speckle data, which may happen to come from Revit, Archicad, Rhino, or even Blender. Whether it makes sense to do so quickly becomes clear.
There shouldn’t be anything preventing a specific data source from being presentable in Excel, but highly nested hierarchies will be more challenging than “flatter” ones.
A strategy from Grasshopper, therefore, could be to pre-flatten the data you want to be presentable in this manner to either a specific prop within what gets sent or separately from the simultaneous structure of paths and nodes.
From Rhino, I can’t think of a specific reason it would cause the Excel connector to fail, but if you have a concrete example, we can take a look.
https://app.speckle.systems/projects/cea50fe938/models/6676e7c17a
The above is the project where the Rhino data is hosted. As a note, I could receive the data when I would receive them one by one but when I tried to receive the whole thing at once, it did not work.