Changing the starting sheet number in an .idw file.

[RockyBrown4134]

Is there a way to change the staring sheet number, to a different value in each IDW?

Lets say that I have 300 sheets. In order to maintain a moderate file size, I broke them into six files.

File #1 -  1 through 50.

File #2 -  51 through 100.

File #3 -  101 through 150.

File #4 -  151 through 200.

File #5 -  201 through 250.

File #6 -  251 through 300.

File #1 is correct, with sheets 1 through 50.. However, so are all the other files. Yes, I know I can do it manually. But that is time consuming when you have a large quantity of sheets to produce.

All suggestions or comments are welcome.

Inventor 2015, 2016, and 2017.

Thanks 

[Curtis_Waguespack]

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@RockyBrown4134 wrote:

... I know I can do it manually. But that is time consuming when you have a large quantity of sheets to produce.

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Hi RockyBrown4134,

Can we do it manually? I'm not sure we can. Or maybe I'm misunderstanding or just missing something.

If you have a drawing with 50 sheets, and you  want the count to start at 51, how do you currently get the number after the colon to be 51 without having 50 other sheets in the drawing.

I wasn't able to get my first sheet to be this:

Sheet : 51

If you can explain how you do it manually, I might be able to automate it with iLogic.

I hope this helps.
Best of luck to you in all of your Inventor pursuits,
Curtis
http://inventortrenches.blogspot.com

[blair]

I wouldn't go with more than 20 pages for any drawing group in Inventor. Any individual parts will have their own drawings, along with any sub assemblies having their own drawings.

Should something happen to corrupt your drawing file, you will end up loosing a lot of data. If you need to put the package into a single file, I would be looking at exporting the drawings to PDF and using Adobe's Acrobat DC to put the PDF files into a single PDF.

[RockyBrown4134]

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@Anonymous wrote:

I wouldn't go with more than 20 pages for any drawing group in Inventor. Any individual parts will have their own drawings, along with any sub assemblies having their own drawings.

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We usually go 20-30.  the 50 per file was an example number.

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@Anonymous wrote:

Should something happen to corrupt your drawing file, you will end up loosing a lot of data. If you need to put the package into a single file, I would be looking at exporting the drawings to PDF and using Adobe's Acrobat DC to put the PDF files into a single PDF.

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We already do. The key here is that we want to keep drawings in a numerical sequence, updating automatically when a sheet is added, including across multiple .idw files.

[salariua]

I have an absurd proposition.

Create 4 drawings with 200 sheets and only use 0-50 on first, 51-100, second,etc, but mark the empty sheets as “Exclude from Printing”, don’t mark “Exclude from Count” and give the empty ones a specific name like “NOT_USED”.

This way it will report correct quantity in titleblock and you get smaller files.

I am sure it will take @Curtis_Waguespack wayyyy less time to write the ilogic for you than it would take me.

But you are right, we should be able to specify the start number of the sheet, like when I split a large drawings, each sheet on it's own drawing.

[RockyBrown4134]

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@salariua wrote:

But you are right, we should be able to specify the start number of the sheet, like when I split a large drawings, each sheet on it's own drawing.

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Adding that many empty sheets is not a good option. However, I will give you a Kudo for understanding the situation. 

[RockyBrown4134]

After all the drawings sets are done, I put them all into one, IDW in order, and plot/export them out to a PDF.

Most drawings sets are around 15 to 25 sheets. They are no problem. It's when I have that once every so often set that's 100+ sheets that's frustrating.

[Mark.Lancaster]

@RockyBrown4134

I found this piece of code that will do the numbering for you..  Granted it does fail at the end but it will get you started.  Maybe @Curtis_Waguespack can chime in and assist with the code.. 

But its only going to create the format..  Meaning its not going to update the sheet # info when you add/remove sheets.

[I_Forge_KC]

Couldn't you make a template with a user parameter of "starting_page" and then update the title block to include a (<starting_page> + <sheet_number> - 1) in there?

[Curtis_Waguespack · Accepted solution]

Hi everyone,

I looked at this yesterday thinking that we could automate the sheet count with illogic, but did not see a way to renumber sheets.

Inventor counts the sheets automatically, no?

Yesterday, I asked the question of how we might change the starting sheet number manually. I do not see anyway to do so, and unless I'm missing something there is not a way to do so programmatically either.

The only way that I know of to change the sheet numbering is to use the "exclude sheet from count" to reduce the sheet count, or add sheets and "exclude from printing" to add sheets to the count:

http://help.autodesk.com/view/INVNTOR/2015/ENU/?guid=GUID-DB07D95B-8FC6-44A3-89E2-F903811DA2BE

I suppose we could do this with iLogic:

create 50 new "dummy" sheets and set them to be excluded from print, so that the first "real" sheet is 51, but that does not seem like a good solution.

This is the boiled down version of the code that Mark.Lancaster pointed us to, it renames sheets, but does not truly renumber them.

Example:

start with this:

Sheet:1

Sheet:2

Sheet:3

results are this:

Sheet 51:1

Sheet 52:2

Sheet 53:3

Dim oDrawDoc As DrawingDocument
oDrawDoc = ThisApplication.ActiveDocument
Dim oSheets As Sheets 
oSheets = ThisDoc.Document.sheets
Dim oSheet As Sheet
Dim startsheet As Integer
startsheet = InputBox("Sheet to start drawing at", "Sheet Numbering")	

i = startsheet
For Each oSheet In oSheets
oSheet.activate
'loop through and rename sheets to the new sheet numbering	
oSheet.Name = "Sheet " &  i
i=i+1
Next

I_Forge_KC's suggestion to create a user parameter to do the numbering and use that in the title block, etc. would be the only way to do this, but it would likely be a pretty big shift in the way that RockyBrown4134 is doing things now.

I hope this helps.
Best of luck to you in all of your Inventor pursuits,
Curtis
http://inventortrenches.blogspot.com

[BeasterlyJEC92]

Hey this solved my problem, Thanks! 

[pmaxwellNKJEX]

I was looking for something similar, but also with some formatting.

I ended up modifying code from (https://forums.autodesk.com/t5/inventor-ilogic-and-vb-net-forum/add-leading-zeros-to-title-block/m-p...) but tweaked it to have an adjustable start number.

I made SheetStartNum as a a user parameter and updatable by a field in a form, but could be done manually via parameters also.

Dim oSheets As Sheets = ThisDrawing.Document.Sheets
For Each oSheet As Sheet In oSheets
	oSheetNumber = CInt(oSheet.Name.Split(":")(1)+SheetStartNum-1).ToString("0000")
	
	Dim oTB As TitleBlock = oSheet.TitleBlock
	For Each oTextBox As Inventor.TextBox In oTB.Definition.Sketch.TextBoxes
		If oTextBox.Text = "<CustomSheetNumber>"
			oTB.SetPromptResultText(oTextBox, (oSheetNumber))
			Exit For
		End If
	Next
Next