Color code rooms based on room numbers

[mikaza32]

Hello,

 

I'm wondering if CAD could be used to solve a very very tedious and error prone thing I do on occasion at work.

I guess this all hinges on the very premise of how .dwg files and cad work, does cad have any concept of a room and it's attributes &/ objects?
Let me quickly explain what I manually do, and hopefully someone can tell me if CAD is a path worth pursuing :)

I'm not afraid of learning new things, but I'd like to know if this is a feasable project for me to start on during christmas :)

 

What I do:

I have a PDF file with the layout of a building where each room has a room number, then I have a excel sheet with all the room numbers and some data which indicates a color the room should be.

I then have to use a paint program to color each room to the appropriate color based on it's room number. This is very tedious and naturally error prone.

I also have access to .dwg files of the building plan, when opened in CAD I can see that the room numbers are stored in a Block Attribute with the tag "ROOM_NUMBER" so the information exists in these files atleast.

 

Now the question:

Is it feasable to use cad to create a pdf or image file where it sets the background or fill color based on the room's attribute "ROOM_NUMBER"?

[f700es]

It sounds like you need a cad based FM system. I have one I use but it's VERY expensive. It can provide plans shaded by several means. 

[Murph_map]

AutoCAD Map3D is one tool that could do this. However with plain Autocad AFAIK you would need someone do some custom programing. 

[BIGAL]

Yes it exists maybe something close already using lisp to do what you want, the quickest way is to export out of excel a csv file of room Numb,colour. Its a simple match then to find the room number and hatch an area using a solid hatch with correct colour.

 

Post a sample dwg. Only need a couple of rooms and a csv file with roomnumb , colour.