Well we used many different programs over the years but what we were using to generate cut-lists for most of our jobs was Cabinet Vision. I playing with the 'Data Extraction Wizard' tool under the Annotate tab in AutoCAD I can see it looks like it is capable of giving me what I am looking for, which is basically just the length and width of a 'block' on the screen. And that's pretty much it, I don't really need any other information except for the width and length of a part and have the 'Date Extraction Wizard' tell us what the name of that part is exactly (top rail, stile, mid-rail, etc.) nothing fancy and I'm sure the Extraction Wizard can be set-up properly to do that, I'm pretty certain on that. If you want a synopsis of what's going on, here is a post below I posted on CNC Zone last week explaining the situation, just going about the problem through AutoCAD now as opposed to AlphaCAM. - Sean To make a long story short, up until a few weeks ago we were using Cabinet Vision to design, layout, nest, machine and report cut lists for us at our millwork company. It worked great for 90% of what we did and it was excellent for creating shop drawings for the bench mechanics in the shop. Unfortunately as we hired new architects and project managers and got involved with new builders translating the record copy architectural AutoCAD drawings into Cabinet Vision ended up missing information, mistakes etc. So our solution to this problem was anytime the architect/builder not familiar with our company and requires legitimate architectural drawings, our architect is responsible for the drawings, shop drawings and layout of all the components/parts on sheets that are exported into DXF files that are then nested/layed out in AlphaCAM and then sent to the CNC. This literally turned the mistakes from 5-15 on a job to 0 and if there is a mistake its completely on our architect who is drawing/laying out the job in AutoCAD. We figured out the math and even though the architect/drafter is spending more time in AutoCAD laying things out we are saving approx. 80 hours of drafting time overall on a mid-size job. But anyway, we set-up a report in AlphaCAM for the CNC operator to generate a parts list so he can label the parts after they are cut and we did that fairly easily. It doesn't have the sizes of the parts on the sheet which we would have liked, but it does have name of the part if it gets edgebanding etc, which is done prior with text in AutoCAD before nesting in AlphaCAM. So thats great and everything, but we are still missing one piece of the puzzle and thats to generate hardwood cut-lists in AlphaCAM through a report, which Cabinet Vision did in 2 clicks of a button. What i'm looking for is a way to generate dimensions/sizes of the individual parts, I figured out how to report overall sheet sizes (usually 48x96) for the CNC reports but still haven't figure out how to generate sizes for the individual parts that are nested. Does anyone have any idea how to pull that off?? I see codes in the report design like [Nested Sheet Data.Length] which dimensions the length of the sheet obviously, was wondering if there's a code like that to define the parameters of parts or theres a way of getting it to automatically do it. Thanks for the read! -- Sean
