Single line text extraction/export possible?

[TRLitsey]

Hi, It has been a while since I ran into this so I thought I would ask if there is a tool to extract single line text.  I have a panel layout balloon drawing with a 104 line item BOM.  The BOM and the drawing have been exploded into unintellegent bits an pieces.  That means I cannot re-create the BOM report.  The BOM itself has been blown-up so that it is four columns, item, part number, qt and description.  all four entities have been reduced to single line text.  When I select all and try to paste it into a spread sheet it wants to come in as some type of image.  Anyone found a way to pull a group of text entities out of a drawing?  Tomarrow is going to be a very long day if I have to rebuild the table one entity at a time.  Thanks for any suggestions or comments.

[s.wile]

WOW! I never thought something like this would be so impossible. I have tried taking a drawing, or parts of it, to PDF, Word in varies formats, Excel, Notepad++, dwf, and finally Corel Draw via dxf.

CorelDraw can open a dwg directly by the way.

From CorelDraw I can copy and paste the text into Excel but it doesn’t keep the rows. It also fails if the text format changes in the selection. So the Headers would need to come separate.

So I guess you could copy one row at a time from CorelDraw over to Excel.

I really thought I would find an easier workaround.

[s.wile]

Or you could go the OCR route.

If you have MS OneNote you can use its OCR from an exported image. The trouble is typos. Here I simply used a screen grab and you can see the very first word is misspelled. A higher quality export would translate better. Of course you still have the problem with breaking the rows back into proper columns. I still like the Corel method better because it is using the EXACT wording originally on the drawing.

   

[sonny3g]

Okay, I am using AutoCAD Electrical 2014 and did a little experimenting.  I have attached a short .wmv file showing what I did.  Basically, using Data Extraction on the Tools menu I was able to extract a table of text to a spreadsheet.  Once there you will still have a lot of work to re-organize it the way you want, but at least it is all there.

Sorry if the video is a little jerky and short but the size limitation for an upload made it so.

Hope this helps you out.

Scott

[s.wile]

Great idea. And if a single column was selected each time it could be easily placed back in order in Excel.

I was stuck on the copy and paste method and never thought of that command. To be honest the only thing I have ever used it for was to extract data from attributes.