• What’s the function of COPYLINK Command?

The command for copying links is COPYLINK, its function description in Help of GstarCAD 2019 is: Users could copy the current view to clipboard and paste objects in clipboard to another file as a linked OLE object.

If we want to copy and paste CAD drawings to Word or Excel files, we’ll usually need to select objects in the CAD drawings, press CTRL+C, press CTRL+V in the Word or Excel file.

But with COPYLINK command, we don’t need to select objects first, we only need to adjust the viewport to the suitable status and execute the COPYLINK command, as shown in the following picture.

Then press CTRL+V in the Word or Excel file to paste the drawing, as shown in the following picture.

If you pay attention, you can see that a temporary graphic file of what you’ve copied was generated, that’s why you can paste into other software.

There are no shortcut keys for the COPYLINK command. We don’t need to select graphics first, but I prefer CTRL+C and CTRL+V for they are simpler.

• Can we use COPYLINK Command if CTRL+C and CTRL+V don’t work?

If there are very special graphics in some drawings, for example, if proxy entity in the drawing is selected, using CTRL+C will get prompts indicating that it’s unable to copy to the Clipboard.

By default, the proxy entity is empty in some professional CAD software, but in other professional CAD software, the proxy graphics are visible.

Copying links will ignore the proxy graphics, when the drawings contain proxy graphics, we won’t get the prompts from clipboard by using COPYLINK. If the proxy graphics in the drawings are redundant data, we could use COPYLINK to solve the problem. If the proxy graphics in the drawing are useful and we wish to reserve the original data, then we can’t use the COPYLINK.

So how to solve the problem, just open the professional CAD system that supports customized objects.

In one word, if the graphics affect the copy and paste, then we can’t use the copy and paste; but if we don’t need to reserve the graphics, then we can use copy and paste.