Excel counting blocks

Hi everyone, got a little question here.

First of: I’m working with AutoCAD2008.

For my drawings (stores with lamps (blocks)). I have made a standard excel sheet that I copy to my drawings. In it is a description of every possible lamp that can go into the store, along with the amount and power of each lamp. At the end the list counts all the powers and makes a total.

What I do now, is count the lamps (blocks) with Nordined app. Write them down and fill in the excel sheet. Works just fine, but leaves me with one problem. Between AutoCAD counting blocks and me filling in the amount of lamps, things can go wrong (as in: me filling in the wrong numbers ).

So simply sad, what I would like is to give the excel sheet some sort of link to the drawing where it’s in, so that it can count the number of lamps.

I have no idea if this is anywhere near possible… so sorry if I’m asking for the impossible.

I know about BCOUNT and EATTEXT but it can’t give me exactly what I’ve made with excel (or that I know of).

Can't you extract the info to a table in your drawing? From there it seems it would be possible then to transfer the data to a spreadsheet.

The blocks have attributes right?

Well I used to have al de info as a big attribute block in AutoCAD, but I got fed up using that so I made my life easier by using excel. So I don’t necessarily need the excel sheet, I just find it easier to adjust the lay-out to the costumers liking.

I suppose I can’t transfer the excel sheet to a AutoCAD table?

I guess I can make an AutoCAD table (but that’s gonna take time, bleg). Then how can I make it count “by itself”? And yes, the blocks have attributes.

Got it! Managed to transfer the excel sheet to an AutoCAD table (paste special> AutoCAD Entities). Everything seems to be working with the counting of the powers. Only thing left to do now is to make it count the blocks in de drawing…

Anyone an idea how to make a table count blocks (with attributes)?