Hi all, we're looking at extracting a bill of materials from our drawings.
I get the premise of using embedded attributes - I've used these in various blocks/title blocks for other reasons.
The idea is to use this to provide accurate counts of materials and fittings for the purchasing department/contracts managers to use for contract costings etc following some recent er...
confusion over fittings requirements and lack of materials delivered to site... in the words of one full autocad tutorial page on the subject:
EXTRACTING ATTRIBUTE DATA IN AUTOCAD
So now you're wondering what can you do with all of this information. A CAD drawing can be used to track inventory and export that data to another file (such as Microsoft Excel - a spreadsheet application) for others to use. Maybe the purchasing department wants to know what to order, based on the design you are working on.
Because I'm shackled with LT, there's no handy EATTEXT command (tools/data extraction) that streamlines the process with shiny dialog boxes and output settings in check-boxes.
So after much preambulatory waffling, we come to the crunch (you can't handle the crunch!) - can anyone push me in the direction of a half decent tutorial on how to write the 'attribute extraction template file' to use with ATTEXT - I've had a look at the help files, but I'd like a real world tutorial to learn the workings of it all instead of guessing and trial and error.
Most of the ones I've seen only cover FULL AutoCAD, so my optimism is repeatedly dashed to smithereens upon the bulwark of LT's 'budget functionality'.