living room furniture elevation cad block

block attributes play a critical role in many autocad drawings but when it comes to updating a bunch of block attributes at once, the process can be as tedious as it is time consuming in this video i'm going to share with you a super easy way to batch update block attribute values using microsoft excel. so in this scenario i have a floor plan that has a series of room tags, and what i'd like to do is change the numbering convention from room 190 to 1090 - and the same throughout the entire floor plan here so in order to accomplish this i'm going to pick on one of the room tags. i'm going to right click and use the really really awesome select similar tool. one of my favorite commands in autocad. and that is going to select all of the room tags in my drawing.

now from here i'm going to navigate over to the express tools tab. and under the blocks panel the super awesome command that we're going to be looking for is export attributes, or for you command line folks, you can type attout. now what this is going to do is allow me to create a text file. a tab delimited text file. i'll go ahead and save that out to my desktop. and what i can do with this is jump over to excel. and import that... text file into a new excel spreadsheet. so this is just a tab delimited file and here are all of my block attribute values. now we just a little bit of excel formula voodoo i can do something like minus 100, plus 1000 enter and there is my room number. and what i'll do is just copy and paste this over like so; and fill the formula down; just basic excel stuff

and the nice thing is if i just hide that colum. now what i'm going to do is do a save as on this particular excel spreadsheet and then save this as a text tab delimited file here and i'll just save it out to my desktop. it doesn't matter what you name it. and now if i come back over to autocad i can use the other half of the command which is import attributes. so i'm going to zoom in so you can see the change here. if i come here to import attributes. i can go out and browse to the text file that i'd just exported that book1.txt as it was named. and as soon as i click ok all of my block attributes have been updated to the new numbering convention that i have applied to my plan. it's as simple as that!

so there you gave it. a quick way to update many block attributes at once. for thecadgeek.com, i'm donnie gladfelter thank's so much for watching!

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