A Rainy AutoCAD Hip Tip (in the summer?)

I realize that some of you out there are used to having rain in the middle of summer - but not so up here in Northern California!  What is one to do with soggy lawn furniture? 

One great thing about working at Autodesk is their willingness to support a wide variety of charities.  You'll also find a vast crew of Autodesk employees who donate their time to those causes they feel passionate about.  One such group has formed a team who are biking for Multiple Sclerosis and they're looking for support from the likes of you!  If you'd like more information on Team Autodesk, or are feeling charitable today and would like to donate to this great cause just refer to either of the above links.  My hats go off to these guys and their great efforts! 

You'll notice that there is one non-Autodesk biker up there - Roopinder Tara of Tenlinks fame.  Roopinder is an avid bicyclist and has also been kind enough to ride with Team Autodesk.  (Thank you Roopinder!)

I've received a few emails about my Hip Tip from yesterday on BCOUNT.  Apparently it does work on Dynamic blocks as long as the Visibility parameter hasn't been altered (thank you Ray Mendoza!).  And Tracy Lincoln reminded me that I forgot to mention that BCOUNT doesn't work on nested blocks or blocks within XREFs.  For any of those cases you'll need to use EATTEXT.

A Hip Tip on getting a True Block Count:

Many of us count our blocks by hand - and I mean literally "by hand".  We get a marker out and count them...what a drag.  The Enhanced Attribute Extraction command, EATTEXT, will absolutely count your blocks up for you and even write the information out to an Excel file or an AutoCAD Table.  Let's take a quick look!

You can find this command under Tools>Data Extraction (in AutoCAD 2008) - or just type it in.  This function changed quite a bit in AutoCAD 2008 to accommodate extracting object data along with blocks - but we are focusing on Blocks for today.  Follow this friendly wizard along, answering the questions with each page.  On the second page of the wizard you'll see an option for Settings as seen below - this will allow you to indicate you want to include blocks from Xrefs as well (your call here).

If you have no intention of extracting object data - if your entire goal is to get a block count you can uncheck the first two options under Extraction settings that focus on objects.

Page 3 let's you focus on blocks and only blocks.

You'll see a check box in the lower left corner entitled "Display blocks only"...that's the one you want - then proceed to the next page.

Page 4 wants to know what information you want to display about your blocks...since you only want to count the blocks - you just need check one thing - anything - to move on to the next page.  Unfortunately you can't progress through the wizard without selecting something!  (bummer).

I selected Block Unit and deselected everything else!

And finally - the next page has the information you're after - the Block Count!

Voila!  The good news here is that once you've gone through all of this and saved it to a template file you won't have to select all these options over and over (thankfully).

For those of you who are not on AutoCAD 2008 yet you'll actually see that you have it much easier.  EATTEXT was expanded in 2008 making it more powerful, but also making it a bit harder to quickly count your blocks.  : (

So there you go - Enjoy!