Search the Community
Showing results for tags 'document control'.
-
Creating a drawing register in Excel using automation and AutoCAD title block
grahamd_41 posted a topic in CAD Management
This seems to be a very widely asked question with many people wanting different solutions. After several days of searching I find myself asking the question here. I work for a small electrical design company. We work with many AutoCAD drawings which require transmittal back and forth to customers. With each set of drawings that we send, we send a document listing all the drawings (a drawing register). This is pretty common practice. Currently we have to manually input the drawing numbers, titles, revision numbers etc. in to an Excel spreadsheet template. What I would like to do is semi-automate this process, preferably using Excel's VBA, or at a later date MS Access. I have some experience in using VBA, accessing other xls files on the server and collating information, but have never used it to access an AutoCAD dwg file. In short, what I have/want to do is as follows: I have an Excel template that lists will list all the drawings for transmittal. I have hundreds of AutoCAD drawings which contain a title block with the following attributes: Drawing_number, Title_1, Title_2, Title_3, Revision (and more, but these are the main required attributes for the drawing register) I want to run the excel file, select (through the use of a browse file command, which I am familiar with) the drawings I wish to add to the list, extract the information contained in the above attributes, write this information to my desired cells in the drawing register. I am fairly competent at programming and trained in C, C#, C++ at university (a few years ago) so my understanding is okay. I am just struggling with acquiring the code to access AutoCAD attributes. My understanding is that I need to use a library to prevent me opening AutoCAD each time I read a file, but again I'm unsure of how to do this. I do not wish to extract the information from the AutoCAD files individually as this would be far too lengthy and I want to avoid the use of lisp as I wish to enclose the whole package of creating a drawing register for other users in the company who have very little/no experience of programming code. I would also like to avoid datalinks, this isn't an option, and I don't wish to be able to modify the content of the AutoCAD title block using Excel (unless this is a very simple addition, as it isn't required at this stage) Thank you in advance. Graham- 9 replies
-
- excel
- document control
-
(and 1 more)
Tagged with:
-
I am trying to develop a document control system for my drawings. I am currently using AutoCAD 2011 but will soon move over to 2012. My previous employer had a great system using an excel spread sheet to input details that would then be updated into the drawings' annotated title block using a .csv file and the 'update' command to complete the job. How can I create this same system, can anyone help me please?
- 2 replies
-
- document control
- annotated title blocks
-
(and 2 more)
Tagged with: