All about Data extraction in AutoCAD

hello and welcome to source card in this video I will tell you about the data extraction tool and basically I'll use data extraction tool to extract data related to our drawing in an external excel sheet as well as in a table which is the generic orga table right inside of a drawing I'll use two different drawings for this the first one is this one which you see on your screen right now it is the simple drawing with lots of objects and blocks and I'll extract data from this drawing and I'll also use another drawing where I'll extract data from blocks containing attributes so let's get started alright so here we have this drawing and right now we have lots of blocks inside this drawing now to start extracting data I'll go to this annotate tab and right here on the tables panel we have this extract and data tool you can use this or you can also use a data extraction command or you can use DX command alias in this case I will use the command alias DX and I'll press ENTER and this will open data extraction wizard now in this wizard will start by creating a blank data extraction we don't have a data extracted table yet and we are not modifying it but if you have an existing data extracted table then you can select this add an existing data extraction and then use that to modify it further but in this case we just want to extract it from a completely blank drawing like this we just have it and we just want to extract the data so I'll select the first option and I will click on next and here we have it so this will open save data extraction as window and here you can save this data extraction file now this is the DXE file which you can use later to modify your data extraction so I'm gonna just type sample data and I'll hit the Save button now this will extract our data from this complete and drawing but if you want to just select power of this drawing to extract the data you can select the second option so right now the first option is selected and it will include all the drawing and every single component in it but if you select the second option this box will highlight and now you can click on this box and select an area from the drawing and now if you press ENTER the data will be extracted from only this part of the drawing but that's not what we want so I'm going to select the first option and I'll include all the drawing from this current sample of his plan now the data will be extracted from this drawing which is right now here on this location if you want to add more drawings then you can select add drawings and you can add as many drawings as you want alternatively you can also add entire folders and all the drawings inside those folders will be used for our data extraction so in this case we don't want to do that so I'll just leave it the way it is now we have some options here in the Settings button so if you select the Settings button we have options like you can select the objects from where you want to extract the data so if you want to extract the data from block select this if you want to extract it from xrefs select this if you want to include xrefs in the block counts use this and if you want to extract data from drawings in the model space then select this and if you want to extract it from model as well as from the layout space then select this option so we just want the default options here we want to extract data from everything and I don't want xrefs to be counted as block so I'll leave this one unchecked now I'll click OK and we also don't have any external reference here so that won't matter in this case now with these settings I'll click on next and here we have a sample data which is extracted so what do we have here well if you look at this we right now have all the objects which are present inside of a drawing now if you want of some reason see only the blocks that contain attributes then you can click this checkbox and now the list will show only objects that contain attribute but we don't want this for now we'll do it in the next exercise for now I'll leave this one unchecked and now we have all the object types as well as objects which are currently in use you can uncheck this option if you want to include every single object which is inside this drawing or maybe objects which are not even part of this drawing if you want to include those objects as well keep this thing unchecked but in this case we only want to select the objects which are in this drawing and in the visible area also all the object types are selected but if you uncheck this option you have the option of selecting either blocks or non blocks so you can just select that now this will only display objects which are not blocks this will only display objects which are block you can see the type as well here well in this case we want both so I'll just select this option now you can filter through all the data types that we have in this case we have lots of blocks these blocks essentially which are created by default and we don't want these blocks in our extracted table so I'll just uncheck these all so I'll uncheck all the non block objects so it is better if we uncheck this option and select only this one display block only now that way we can easily uncheck the options and there we are so we only have blocks visible we don't want non blocks object so that's that and here also if you just want to hide any of these you can just select that but that's enough we just want to remove these objects from our selection when you are done select next all right now here we have lots of properties related to our objects and the easiest way to filter through these properties is the category filter so in this case we don't want properties related to 3d visualization so I'm grant check this and now we have properties related to drawing general properties geometry and miscellaneous we want these but here also I'll filter some of these properties so we may not want some properties and those properties I'm going to just uncheck here so the things which we don't want our scale so X Y Z scale we don't want that and subject I don't want that either title I don't want that total editing type no I don't need it ok then position rotation I want it so position I don't want it so I'll just uncheck so these are the information that I don't want in my final table plots let's leave it line wait line type scale line type layer keywords no we don't want that hyperlink base hyperlink nope file size no we don't want that filename we don't need it okay file modified in file location not all needed and file last saved by not needed ok and maybe we can uncheck file accessed and file created as well and this info is drawing revision number let's leave it for now comments color block unit author ok all these informations we'll just we just want it and we'll see if we don't want any of these information at a later stage we can get back to this window page for a fade and we can then change it again but for now that's enough and I'll click on next alright now you'll see this warning and this warning simply says that all the blocks which are non uniformly scaled will not be included in this Vizard and that's also obvious because non uniformly scale blocks will have a skewed data so that's obviously excluded from other extraction Vizard so that's ok and then here we have the final table which we are going to get now if you want this table directly in your drawing that's fine but if you want to refine this table and just fine-tune all the settings and all the information inside this table then you can change some of the parameters the first few things which I see here is the empty column so I can clearly see that all the column is empty comments is also completely empty so these two are completely empty and we don't need it so I'll just right click on this and I'll select hide column similarly for this one hide column and this also I think is completely empty and yes it is so right-click and hide column and yes empty tables are gone now also we might have columns with single information for example block unit ok we have different information in these line type everything is by layer and yes everything is by layer in line type so adding this column is kind of useless in this case so I'll just hide this column as well now line type scale I leave that line weight all right this is by layer everywhere so I'm gonna hide it and this works rotation unit factor I think it has different values and yes it is so that's that so we have all the useful columns here now in this case identical columns are combined so if you look down you'll see that we have four instances of a tree three-block now if you uncheck this well all the tree 3 there's all separate so if you just want them separately like this you can leave it or you can just combine them into single column also you can show the count column which will show you the number of objects or the count of those objects in this case we are just talking about blocks so it's showing the count of those blocks just leave it checked if you want it also the name column which is this one so if you don't want any of these you can just check or uncheck these but in this case these are really very important columns so I just want to keep them now with these settings you can click full preview to see what you are going to get and I'm going to do that so here it is here's the final table which we'll be getting here in AutoCAD or maybe if you want this table as an external excel file you can just get that as well so that's our table now I'll just close this and I'll click on next and here we are on almost the last pitch of this wizard and here we can extract information in two different ways you can either extract the information as an excel file CSV m DB or a txt file you can save it anywhere you want or you can extract the table as an AutoCAD table and in this case I'll do both I'll extract it as an AutoCAD table and also as an external file for the external file I'll specify desktop as my location so I'll just click on this ellipsis and I'll bring the save as window here so if the save as window and I'm gonna just save it here so let's call it office data and now you can see that it is saving it in XLS format you can change it to m DB CSV or simple text format I'll leave XLS format and I'll save it ok so it will save info here and now we can go to the next option where we'll create a table right inside AutoCAD so let's do that let's click on next and here we are in the table wizard now let's give name well if you want to name your table you can just give the name for example data extraction and you can even change the type of table so right now it's using the standard style of of a table and if you just want to be creative here click this box and now we understand a table click and modify and you can change the formatting for example you can go to text and change the text size if you want to maybe if you want to change the text color only you can just do that as well so in this case just for the sake of creativity and just to show that this thing is possible I'll change the text color to green and now this text is changing only for the data types not for title or for hitter so that's that and now with that I'll click on OK ok so we've only changed a single property and closed and there we are click on next and finally finish and now one our cursor we have the extracted table which is very tiny so let's increase its size so I'm gonna go to Home tab scale I'll select the table and I'll just make it a little bit bigger maybe a scale of 30 should do and yes it is good for this example I'm going to now move this table right here and as you can see the color is green because we changed it in the table wizard and this table now contains information related to every single block in our drawing so our chair has been used once the unit is millimeter color the layer is from this layer line type scale is this the plot style is this it's rotated to this angle unit factor is this so every single property is here and the best part about this table is it is completely linked table now to show this in action I will once again take you to the 3-3 block now the tree 3 block has been used four times in our drawing as you can see here it's clearly visible also if you just move here let's just scroll down and we'll change one of the properties here so here we can maybe change the color so the color of this 3 3 is is is by layer as you can see here it's by layer sotry 3 color is by layer we'll change the color of this tree 3 now the three three is this one this tree in a bird drawing it's been used four times and if you could insert you will be able to see this here so that's the three three all right now let's select this and I'll select all of these and I'll change the color to anything random and here it is so the color of these trees well it changed though it is not yet visible here in the drawing area because inside the blocks the colors were defined as green so that's why it's not changing it but that's something for another video in this case the color has changed and if you now select it it will show that color so that's the color override which is applied here now the same information should be visible in our extracted table so if you go to three three look at this it's a still by layer nothing has changed but yes things are now different and it has changed do you see the updated information all you need to do is select the table right-click and select update table data links and there it is now you'll notice that the updated color will show up right here also when you hover your cursor over this table you will see not only this link icon but also this padlock icon well this indicates that the table is a linked table linked to your drawing and padlock icon indicates that these infos are completely logged you cannot well modify it but if for some reason if you want to just modify it you can do that as well so here if let's say you want to modify this information right here then you can select this and it is still locked but you can go to cell locking make it unlocked double click inside this and now change it so this is name I'm going to change it to name off block and there we are I will click outside and there it is so that's a modified information and that's the simple data extraction and using this you can obviously extract well great amount of information now I'll also open the excel sheet so the equivalent excel sheet of this table is this one so here you can see that the same table has been extracted here and you can just compare the information using this a tree 3 which is by layer because that's the original table created by data extraction where we had the color as bilayer alright so now let's talk about extracting information from attributed blocks so I'll open another drawing and we'll open this attribute example now this attribute example drawing is available inside your AutoCAD installation directory as well when you start out a cat for the first time you will see this attribute example drawing and that's the same file now here we'll use once again data extraction and we'll extract information from blocks containing attributes so again I'll use DX for the data extraction and here if you now want to modify your existing file which we created in the previous example then you can go to edit an existing data extraction click the ellipsis and select the sample data file which we created earlier click open next next just select yes and look at this it has all the info from our previous example but that's not what we want so I'm going to go back and I'll select create a new data extraction now select next and next and here we want to extract data from attributed blocks of blocks containing attributes so I'll check this box and now we have lots of objects well that includes block and non block so we just want information from block so I'll just check the first one then shift select the last one and I'll uncheck every single option now I'll click outside and I'll just check this option RM numb and I'll click on next alright now here I'll uncheck 3d visualization we don't want information related to this we definitely want information related to attributes and we also want other information so I'll keep those things checked here also you can check or uncheck the settings that you maybe want you don't want so we'll just uncheck all the settings related to the geometry of this drawing and just to simplify this process maybe we'll also uncheck the options related to drawing all right now we have a simplified kind of table now I'll click on next and the same warning and there we are now we have the simplified form of table again you can just modify it the way you want so in this case I'll maybe hide the hyper linked column we don't want it everything looks good and here also you can hide some of the columns that are completely identical and in this case I think that the plot style rotation and unit factor are exactly identical so I'm gonna hide these three because they don't have any kind of useful thing for us then the line type scale is well again same so I'm gonna hide this and that's that now layer is zero well we can hide this as well I'll not hide many other well blocks here because we don't have that many here and we just have a simple RM num block and that attribute also here if you just want to maybe change the layout of these columns you can just do that for example the block unit if you don't want it here you can just drag it to somewhere in the end so I'm gonna just drag it after maybe line weight right here and similarly you can just rearrange it once you are done with this click on next and now you know the next steps so I'll simply select the first option here we just want to extract the data and we want to keep it in the drawing so I'll select the first option and I'll click on next there we have it we are not going to change anything else I'll just type in attribute so maybe ATT that's enough and I'll click on next and finish click at a point to place it select scale and again 30 times and that looks good and there we are so now we once again have this data extraction from our drawing and this contains information related to our attributed block so every single reference of that block has been added here and that's the data extraction tool I hope you found this video helpful now if you have any question related to this let me know in the comment box and don't forget to share this video thanks for watching and I'll see you soon in another video you

Channel: SourceCAD

Views: 62,018

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Keywords: data extraction in autocad, data extraction as excel, autocad data extraction

Id: UIPZlKK6hpA

Length: 19min 48sec (1188 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 11 2019