Expert: Scott Cook - 7/13/2011

Question
I work with large plan layout with 100's of rooms on. I draw all our equipment in the individual rooms, our blocks are dynamic and carry alot of data. I then go to paper space and insert a drawing boarder (attributed) create a viewport and show only 1 room full of equipment. I would like to extract the data shown only in the viewport and not any other data in model space. I also would like the data in the paperspace to be extracted also. The net result ideally would be that the data extracted to excel would be one paperspace layout = 1 sheet in a workbook. the name of the layout been the name of the excel spreadsheet. I know nothing of lisp routines and I am struggerling. I have done all the blocks thinking this procedure would be available in autoCAD and now hit a brick wall. Any help at all would be appreciated.


Thank you in advance.


Karl

Answer
Are you adding/removing rooms and blocks a lot?  The reason I ask is perhaps you want to "link" blocks and spreadsheets - there are plenty of tutorials online on how to link drawings and excel data. As far as extracting, I'd take a look at the express tools command ATTOUT.  It's not going to do exactly what you want, but perhaps it will suffice.
With some customization, it would be possible to fully automate the process - but you'll need to get the process down manually first using the tools that are available.