Topic: looking for a good schedule builder

[ELOQUINTET]

hey guys need some suggestions here. i'm looking for something for building schedules. in particular hardware and bom. i've been over to cadalog and most of them are based on attribute extraction or xcel. both of these have their drawbacks in my opinion. attributes are no good because say you foget to label one well it doesn't get ordered and you're screwed. xcel i don't like because i'd like to do everything in acad. basically i want to be able to setup a graph then be able to change it per job. any suggestions?

[Keith™]

What do you propose you extract to obtain the BOM? Most BOM proggies use attributes. You could extract block names, but what if one of the blocks ended up being exploded? Give us a bit more direction.

[daron]

Wouldn't ADT do what you're asking?

[ELOQUINTET]

i really just want an editable graph i suppose no extraction neccesary. i started creating a block but hardware is so different for each job that i'd constantly be exploding and modifying it per job. i would like something similar to xcel but all in autocad. i could add a cell,column delete a cell, column etc. etc. if i can do this in adt daron how? thanks for your quick replies...

[daron]

I've only used them once, because my company doesn't like schedules. That's a long story all together. Schedules are great, though. Only problem is that 3.3 and 4.0 are not so similar in their structure. It's not a simple task at first, but powerful once you get things set up. The first thing you need (<- read have) to do, is get Paul Aubin's book "Mastering Autodesk Architectural Desktop". When you get it, the version I have, chapter 11 starts you in on generating schedules. Until you get it, experiment with property set definitions and schedule data. Once you figure those things out, you should be well on your way to obtaining the results you're after. Sorry I couldn't walk you through it, but schedules encompass so many things. You'd be amazed at what they can do. Dive in.

[Mark]

Well you could also give us a dwg that represents what you want.

[daron]

He already has the tools that will do the job, but the tools need to be learned.

[ELOQUINTET]

yeah i started looking in documentation/schedules. it seems to me that you can only create these schedules if you use adt objects. we don't really use the adt stuff we have much because our stuff is really custom. the only thing i really use is the symbols (section marks, elevations etc.) mark i'll upload what i have of my schedule so far but the hard part is making it easy to modify per job.  

[daron]

ADT is all about custom objects. Get Paul's book. Lot's of good things in there. I have the same problem here, though.