In R&D projects as well as in development work,simulations of grid configurations and control methods are acommon tool for assessing different technical options. At thesame time, these simulations are often limited by difficulties indata exchange, simply due to the fact that systems are notcompatible and data format in operational systems is not alignedwith data in simulation and analysis tools. To this extent a toolhas been developed that allows large scale import of real-worldgrid data using CIM XML to state of the art simulation toolsbased on MATLAB. The tool is used in a large FP7 projectinvolving leading European DSOs.