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Best way to count items from AutoCAD plans?

Printed From: CAD Forum
Category: EN
Forum Name: AutoCAD
Forum Description: Discussion about AutoCAD and AutoCAD LT, viewers, DWG and DWF formats, Design Review, AutoCAD 360, add-ons
URL: https://www.cadforum.cz/forum_en/forum_posts.asp?TID=13447
Printed Date: 16.May.2026 at 14:33


Topic: Best way to count items from AutoCAD plans?
Posted By: enimrun
Subject: Best way to count items from AutoCAD plans?
Date Posted: 10.Jun.2020 at 14:31
Hi!

To start this off, I have never used AutoCAD (or any other CAD-programs) in my life, my background is in sales. I currently work in a industrial manufacturing firm, and we provide for example HVAC-solutions to large buildings etc. As of now, our sales team gets these big A1-sized plans designed with AutoCAD, and we need to manually go through each plan to find out e.g. how many valves or such items we need to sell. This of course feels like a outdated and inefficient way of working. What would be the best way to do this? Is there any way to automate this counting process? Maybe there is a software that crunches the data for you and makes a list of item quantities? I tried to Google it and found services like Cadmatic, MagiCAD, OpenBOM and BOM Extractor, would any of these work? I also found mentions of AutoCAD's own data extraction tool, how about that?

Thanks in advance!


Replies:
Posted By: John Connor
Date Posted: 11.Jun.2020 at 23:34
The first step is to make sure the items you wish to count are blocks.  It might also prove useful to assign attributes to the blocks.  For example: a part or catalog number, size, pricing perhaps?

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"Humans have a strength that cannot be measured. This is John Connor. If you are reading this, you are the resistance."

<<AutoCAD 2015>>

Posted By: philippe JOSEPH
Date Posted: 12.Jun.2020 at 07:10
Hello enimrun and John, yes if the entities are made of blocks there is eventually the command : BCOUNT that could work simply and leads to some kind of a part list.
The good way is to launch the command on all the file or on a selection, then press F2 to have an easy access to the list of blocks, copy/paste that list in a multiple line text or in a word file.

Posted By: John Connor
Date Posted: 12.Jun.2020 at 15:48
Or a person could use the DATAEXTRACTION command. 

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"Humans have a strength that cannot be measured. This is John Connor. If you are reading this, you are the resistance."

<<AutoCAD 2015>>

Posted By: philippe JOSEPH
Date Posted: 12.Jun.2020 at 21:01
Yes John and enimrun but is dataextraction easy for a person that have never used AutoCAD ?
If dataextraction needs blocks to count then for a 'simple' use bcount seems OK for me.
In fact I use bcount when in 3D to easily verify the quantities of items in my assemblies and I use the method described in my previous post.
Of course the blocks have to be very well named for a good use and I use the 'polish' method for this i.e. beginning the blocks names with the sub assembly name or the name of the machine like : LIEBHERR-LTM1200-5.1-BOOM-58-3m so that a list of items will be in a usable alphabetical order.
Hope this will help.


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