Block help

I made a drawing that has several objects that I should have made into a block before putting them in but I stupidly didn't. My question is, is there a way to turn one of them into a block and in turn make all of the similar objects the same block?

There are hundreds of them so selecting them all would take way too long. Any help would be appreciated.

sorry but I don't know an easy way of doing this

sorry but I don't know an easy way of doing this

The closest thing I've accomplished is replacing a bunch of circles with blocks. But if the blocks are to be composed of several entities, that's a different story.

How many instances of this do you have? If you can do it manually at least it will be such a pain in the ass that you will never forget to make blocks for repeated geometry

EDIT: post the drawing, maybe one of the wizards might get inspired.

It's like a drawing full of exploded blocks. No-one I have met can ever resolve this without the help of an automated process.

I could try coding up a solution in .NET, but it would take a while - weeks I mean.

Once a co-worker exploded all the instances of a certain block. I wrote a custom program in which you would pick an instance of the block, then select the objects of each exploded instance. The routine would recognize the geometry (rather simple -- an attribute, a polyline, and a line), the text value (because the guy had re-edited the exploded attdefs), and the relation to the insertion point. Then it would insert a new instance of the block with the correct orientation in place of the exploded objects. It is one of the best ones I've done from scratch, but you still had to select the desired block locations one by one...

Thanks for the replies. The objects are actually really simple (a couple of circles and 3 lines, a plan-view tree symbol), but like I said, there are hundreds of them. I'm still a student and am becoming more and more comfortable with CAD, but probably still a newbie compared to most of you.

Sounds like there's no easy way of doing this Guess I better get started selecting them one by one since the project's due tomorrow.

Thanks again.

Actually I think there is, mate.

If you can narrow the selection set down to just the items you want, you can then export the coordinates into excel and repopulate the drawing with an instance of that block at each of the coordinates in the excel spreadsheet.

Then it's just a case of deleting all the entities.

EDIT:Export the coords to a table using EATTEXT.

Once you've got this system nailed you should be able to do each drawing in about 5 minutes, I reckon.