How to produce a Bill of Materials/Schedule

[Tommy111]

Hi everyone,

Basically what I am looking to do is to produce a bill of materials(BOM)/schedule of materials from the contents of my AutoCAD 2007 drawing. I have all my blocks (most of which are dynamic) currently set up in my tool palette.

I had downloaded a trial version of Global CAD, but unfortunately it does not seem to handle dynamic blocks very well.

I had been told by our CAD supplier that 2007 does not produce a BOM and that this can only be gained through a third party software. However, they told me that 2008 has now got a very good BOM/schedule producing tool (Maybe this is only because our subscription is now due ).

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

[Domdeezy]

The best I could find in 2007 was Attribute Extraction under the TOOLS menu. I set up the blocks with the attribute with the information I would like to appear in the BOM (Material Description, Material Pcmark, Length, Qty, etc...). With Attribute Extraction you can select entire drawing or multiable drawings or just an object. You could either extract the BOM to Table within the drawing or Excel format. If you need help setup something up let me know. I running a BOM for trusses now and works great. Good luck.
Dom

[Tommy111]

Thanks Dom.

Does it work ok for Dynamic Blocks, e.g if you stretch a dynamic block, will the revised length show up ok in the BOM. I have found that I can get a BOM from Glodal CAD from standard blocks easily but dynamic blocks seem to be a problem.

Thanks for the advice

[Domdeezy]

Yes it works for Dynamic Blocks. What I did for the length was added a attribute with a formula so if I adjust the length it updates the correct length. I had also created one for weight of material so it would calculate per the length.