Tuesday, October 21, 2014

Exporting Attributed blocks in Autocad LT...who knew...

So, here is one for you LT users.
How many of you want to be able to export your attributed block info into an excel doc inside your LT but aren't quite sure of how to do it.  Well, here is a quick fix for you; the command is called ATTEXT.
You need an exporting template so that it knows what information to look for, but other than that it is pretty straight forward if you have all your blocks with a standard tag name for a block description.  I will show a pic of what i mean by that here in a bit.

First, let's see what this template looks like that is needed to make the attext command work.
So, I use Notepad++ to do my text documents and some other programming work.  Right now I am just going to look at line one; on this line you will see "NAME C032000".  
This first line is what determines whether you will be able to extract block info or not.  In the first picture below I am showing inside the block editor of Autocad LT; where i am defining a new Attribute.  The Tag line in the Attribute is what you are going to be pulling from in the ATTEXT command.

So, below you will see as we insert a block that the attribute that is defined is labeled as "NAME", and if you remember that in our ATTEXT template the first line was labeled NAME.  Now you can set up multiple different attributes that can be pulled out, but we are just going to stick with this for now.

So, we have our block inserted and the title of it is defined in the attribute.  So, let's say we put 3 or 4 blocks in their whether they are the same or different ones.  We can go ahead and do our Attribute Text export.  So, type in ATTEXT and hit enter, then follow the steps in the image below to finish out the command.


So, this finishes our exporting of the Attribute Text; next time we will look at how to convert that text info into an actual spreadsheet.