Expert: Scott Cook - 5/24/2006

Question
Hi Scott
As a landscape architect for a municipal body using autocad 2004 for planting plans, I end up with numerous individual text boxes containing plant tags in a shortened code form, ie  25 LIR mus (= 25 Liriope muscari). Which when completed, invariably results in a plan with a couple of hundred of these individual text boxes that must be manually counted on a hard copy.
Apparently there is a way to programme / set up a function that is able to tally total numbers of individual plants of a similar unique code (ie LIR mus)from within individual text boxes.   Rumour has it (yes...a rumour!) that it may be linked to an external notepad file or some such.

Hoping you can help
regards
andrew

Answer
make sure the tags are blocks with attribute tags. then play around with the attext command to see if you can get a dump of all of them and bring them into excel for counting. it might take some experimentation. if you have been using text only, make yourself a block with an attribute tag and use that from this point forward.