Serious users of BikeCAD Pro will often use a customized spreadsheet to read in data from a CSV file output from BikeCAD Pro.
For example, this spreadsheet tabulates the critical dimensions that we might be accustomed to using when setting up our jigs for a new custom frame. The layout is simple and clean. The data for these fields actually comes from a CSV file generated by BikeCAD Pro. As you can see, this CSV file contains reams of information, so it's nice to have this spreadsheet to pick out just the critical parts that we need for our purposes.
As new versions of BikeCAD are released, this CSV file will often include more data than what was contained in an older file. While this extra data is nice, it will probably mean that our custom spreadsheet which was setup to pick out specific dimensions from our CSV file will not find those dimensions in the same cells as they where found in CSV files from older versions.
An ideal solution to this problem might be to go through our custom spreadsheet and modify the references in each cell so that they point to the appropriate data cell in the latest BikeCAD Pro CSV file. This way, we could extend our spreadsheet to include a few of those newly available dimensions as well.
However, in practice, after having put all that time into setting up that spreadsheet, it might be more efficient to leave the spreadsheet alone and go into the BikeCAD customization dialog box and turn off the individual rows of data that distinguish the new CSV output file from the old. This process is described in an earlier video.
Since there are bound to be several BikeCAD Pro users interested in this, I have already gone through the BikeCAD customization dialog box and turned off all those new rows of data and created a csv_props.xml file that when used in version 8.1 will generate a CSV output file with all the rows of data arranged just as they are in version 7.1. All you need to do to use this file is download it from here: csv_props.xml and place it in your configuration folder inside your BikeCAD Pro installation directory. This file will need to overwrite the file by the same name that is already in this directory.
With all the enhanced functionality plus the ability to customize output to conform to the structure of output from older versions, it is always a good idea to use the latest version of BikeCAD.