AutoCAD 2007 and higher versions

I am going to mention how we can report the detailed properties of the blocks in the drawing in this article. The detailed properties of a block list its number, layer and color information, insertion point, the values of the attributes in a block that we have created.

The window (Figure 1) will appear when the command is typed. This window has two options; the option below is to proceed with the same settings with a saved ‘*.blk’ file created earlier and the upper option is to constitute new settings.

Figure 1.

We decide the blocks from which we want to get a report in the window seen in figure 2 after the selection of the desired option in the previous window and clicking ‘next’. We can get a report of the block properties that we choose with the ‘Select Object’ option. You can ask the properties of all blocks in the current drawing by the ‘Current Drawing’ option. You can get information from the drawings other than the current one by ‘Select Drawings’ option. Any desired drawing can be selected from the coming window when you click the ‘Browse’ button. This lets us get information from several drawings at once.

Figure 2.

Additional settings window (Figure 3) should appear when you click the ‘Additional Settings’ button below.

Figure 3.

Block settings section is about the blocks that are going to be included in the report.

• The interconnecting blocks are all counted if the ‘Iclude Nested Blocks’ option is selected. If not, the most outer blocks are listed, inner blocks are ignored.
• The blocks placed as Xref will also be listed if ‘Include blocks in xrefs’ option is selected. They are not listed, else.
• ‘Include xrefs in block counts’ options determines if the Xref objects are counted into the number of blocks.
‘Count Settings’ option determines which blocks from which area is counted.
• ‘Only include blocks in model space’ option lists the blocks only exist in the model space. The blocks in the layout are not considered.
• ‘Include all blocks from entire drawing’ option lists all of the blocks in the drawing.

The third page (Figure 4) should come up after making the necessary selections and click ‘Next’. We can decide which options of the blocks are going to be listed in this window.

Figure 4.

The blocks with no attributes inside will be excluded from counting if the ‘Exclude blocks without attributes’ option on the top left corner of the window is selected. Likewise, general properties like linetype, color and layer will be excluded form report if ‘Exclude general block properties’ option on the top right corner of the window is selected.
The list on left side of the page shows the blocks in the drawing. We can exclude the blocks that we do not want in the list by unticking them. This list supports multi-selection. To do this, select one of them and then select another when holding ‘shift’ button and system automatically adds the blocks between to the selection.

We can choose the attribute values and block properties that we want to be in the report from the list on the right side of the page. A detailed list (Figure 5) should appear when you make the necessary selections and click the ‘Next’ button.

Figure 5.

We can arrange the columns seen on the page by holding and moving as we want. You can choose the save as type of the data gathered from the drawing by ‘Extract attribute data to’ option. An Autocad type of table will be created and inserted into the drawing if ‘Autocad Table’ opiton is selected. Data can be exported in *.csv, *.xls, *.mdb or *.txt format if ‘External File’ opiton is selected. The fifth step (Figure 6) will appear if ‘Autocad Table’ option is selected.

Figure 6.

You can change the properties of the table that will be inserted into the drawing in the fifth page seen in Figure 6. By clicking ‘Next’, the page that can be seen in Figure 7 will appear.

Figure 7.

A template can be created by ‘Save Template’ option so that you can use same settings later and get a report easily. To complete the process just click the ‘Finish’ button.

Previous Articles:

• Blocks [1][2][3][4]
• Quantity with AutoCAD 2008 : _EATTEXT command

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Last read: 7 October 2008, 4:48

Autocad, Blocks, Command