Extract information from entities or blocks to a table or a CSV file. The Data Extraction wizard enables you to quickly create a bill of materials or to extract other types of information from your drawings. Select entities and filter only the data you want to extract. You can further insert it as a table in the drawing or generate a file that can be imported in a spreadsheet.

Extract Data from a drawing using ARES Commander

ARES Commander allows you to extract data from a drawing. An action has many applications. In this example, we are going to take advantage of the blocks with attributes of ARES Commander to extract those attributes and convert them into a table, which indicates the number of elements and the cost of these.

Thus, in a program like Excel, we could import that information to obtain a total budget of the equipment cost of this project. Although the truth is that we can also do it directly in ARES Commander.

This action to extract data, we can do it to a specific area of the drawing or to the whole drawing. Let’s see how to do it. These chairs are blocks with attributes. In the INSERT tab, we will find DATA EXTRACTION. We have the possibility to create a new data extraction or use an existing one, to update a previous extraction, for example.

Save data as DET. extension format

In this case, it will be a new data extraction. The data will be saved in a DET extension format. In this example, we do not want to extract all the data from the drawing, but we are going to choose specific elements.

Therefore we choose this option. Now with a window, we select the area that includes the elements that interest us. We have selected more than necessary, but it doesn’t matter, we can filter them. Since we are only interested in the chair that is a block with attributes.

We activate and deactivate options to quickly filter the one that interests us. Now you only see the block with attributes that interest us and after selecting it press NEXT. The block as such has much more information related specifically to its attributes.

So we will make a new data leak, deselecting the categories that we are not interested in. Now we only have the attributes of the block, and we can also deselect those that do not interest us. For example, we deselect a DESIGNER. Press NEXT.

Note that the preview of the table indicates the number of elements, there are 62. We even know the individual cost, because it was one more attribute. But we don’t have the total cost of the chairs. Therefore, after pressing NEXT, we can export this data to EXCEL and complement the table by adding a formula that multiplies the number of chairs by the individual cost.

Importing Data to Excel

This action applied to all project equipment would allow us to quickly have the exact cost of the equipment. Now, we can choose between Inserting the data in a table within the ARES Commander drawing or extracting it to an external file that I can import into Excel or another similar one.

Although the truth is that we can also choose both options, and thus generate the table while generating the external file. We have got a table. But before seeing how to perform calculations, let’s make a change. In the drawing, we will remove 6 chairs and we will extract the data again.

In this case, we want to edit an existing one. So we chose the DET extension file that we had created before. We select the entities. Note that ARES Commander remembers our previous preferences, showing only the chair. The “DESIGNER” attribute is also deactivated, so press NEXT. In the preview of the table, we can see that there are now 56, which is 6 less than before.

We choose the 2 options again, to create a table within the ARES Commander drawing and, in this case, to update the previously created file. That’s why he asks us if we want to replace it. Here we have the 2 tables. We can remove the oldest one.

In Excel, we can import the CSV extension file, and after making usual corrections when importing this type of files we get the table, where we can add a multiplication formula at the end

On the other hand, from the table that we have inserted in the drawing, we must not forget that we can add formulas, just as we would in programs such as Excel. To do this, we select a cell. Pressing the right mouse button, we go to INSERT and choose COLUMN RIGHT Or we can do it from the Ribbon. We give this column a name.

In the lower cell, we write a formula, just like in Excel … we start with “=” followed by the coordinates of the cells that in this case, we are interested in multiplying. That is A3 multiplied by E3. Press ENTER, We adjust the size, and so we have a complete table, even capable of performing operations without leaving ARES Commander. Learn more about the new features in ARES Commander.