AutoCAD Electrical

[#1]

Good Morning, I am trying to export a project BOM to either an Excel Spreadsheet or Access Database so that I can add or modifiy a couple of pricing columns. My hope is to have Cost and Resale information stored in the catalog database so that nexttime, I can simply export the BOM and my last pricing is there. I noticed that there seemed to be USER fields in the default_cat.mdb but when I export the project "componants" to access, they do not show up. I want to keep this as simple and painless as I can...

Jim Colacino jcolacino@colacino.com

[#2]

I would not recommend that you do this.  It will make your default catalog .mdb much bigger which will slow down your every day use of AutoCAD.  Especially if you are planning on having the pricing change frequently.  Better to have a seperate spreadsheet or database with the part number and pricing information.  Then create a lisp routine you can run from one of the three post process buttons available in a report to pull that information into the report when building your BOM.  Not painless or quick, but it won't slow down your every day use of ACADE.

[#3]

One of the ways to improve the database is to removeall the items that you will not need from the deault database and institute the use of the secondary file for the complete list.

I copied the original database and renamed it default_original and set i ti up as my secondary databse. I then removed al lthe components that I will not use from the default database. Lookups are now much faster.

[#4]

We did that too.  But if we were to start trying to use the default.mdb for pricing, vendors etc, it would become very unwieldy.  As it is, we reduced it from 300+MB down to 96MB.  Sometimes smaller really is better.

Scott