After over 2 weeks in ASEAN countries I am glad to be back at home. I was fortunate to spend 5 days in Vietnam (pictures to follow) and it was definitely a surreal experience! The people were very friendly, the audience was so appreciative of my AutoCAD presentation (even though they had to listen to me through an interpreter) and many asked for pictures and autographs - really, really so sweet of them. I was fortunate to have a technical interpreter who worked for a local reseller there (that helped tremendously).
Before I get too far down the path of all things Vietnam - let's do a quick Hip Tip to start off the week.
An AutoCAD Hip Tip on Data Linking:
AutoCAD 2007 provides the ability to bring an Excel spreadsheet into AutoCAD (as a Table) and have it fully linked. That means you can edit the Excel spreadsheet and have it update the AutoCAD Table. This also means you can edit the AutoCAD Table and have it update the Excel spreadsheet! That is big news (and fabulous news).
You will find, however, that your linked table, by default, is locked internally. This means that if you make changes inside of the AutoCAD table it will not update the external Excel file. You will need to unlock it first! The means to do so is not intuitive so I thought I'd pass that info on to you.
First - you'll need to go into the Data Link Manager - right click on the existing linked file and select Edit... from the shortcut menu. You can find the Data Link Manager in the Dashboard, under the Tools>Data links>Data Link Manager, or by keying in DATALINK.
In the Edit dialog that follows you will find an obsequious little arrow in the lower right corner as seen below.
This Top Secret arrow will expand this dialog to reveal the key to unlocking the table for writing to the source file as seen below.
Then you are on your way to bidirectional linking! After making changes to your AutoCAD Table you'll still need to tell AutoCAD to write back to the source file. Simply right click on the table and select Write data links to external source as seen below.
And there you have it! Now a few pictures - more to follow...
Ho Chi Minh city is a very, very busy city. It is filled with motor bikes galore - supposedly there is one motor bike for every two inhabitants (if you can imagine). Not too many helmuts though (which makes me a little nervous for them)
The electrical cords at every corner and throughout the streets are amazing...how do they ever figure out what goes where?
We visited a beautiful temple of the Cao Dai religion. This unique religion brings together many religions of different faiths under one roof. What a clever idea! And they all play nicely together...
(it looks as though I was a little crooked there taking the picture) The inside of the temple was also beautiful - we were fortunate to visit during an actual prayer ceremony.
And here you'll see different colored robes representing a variety of different religions.
More food pictures - this is a fish we had for lunch. This is an entire fish that has been fried from top to bottom! So not low-fat...
I'll leave you with a picture of me feeding bamboo to an elephant at the Saigon Zoo (which was permitted).
And one of me going down a river in the Mekong Delta - what an adventure! I was a little concerned about a mosquito bite I encountered but they assured me Malaria wasn't a problem anymore (let's hope they are right!).
So unglamorous - but realize that it is VERY, VERY hot and humid...at some point all worries about how you look just goes out the window...
See you tomorrow!
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