I am working on a piece numbering system and need help with a macro or two. We have been manually updating/typing every piece mark into our drawing cutlist’s. This is probably the most time consuming part of our drawings as there are about 50-60 parts in each of our parts. We are a custom steel fabricator and typically only make things for custom runs and have no off the shelf parts in our operation. I was thinking about how we could improve the process and think it can be done with Macros although I don’t have the skill level to tackle something like this. I wanted to find a way to use the weldment profile design tables as it helps with the piece mark. I have added a cell in my weldment  profile design table named “Prefix” and added a prefix such as ANG for angle, BM for beam, CHL for Channel etc. Anything created in sheet metal should be given a prefix of “PLT”

File Properties/Summary Information-

Job Number-      B1361 (Manually chosen and created in file properties)

Sub Assembly-  10 (Manually chosen and created in file properties)

Weldments-       CHL- (Channel), ANG- (Angle), BM- (Beam), HSS- (Tube) etc. These prefixes are entered onto the weldment design table at “\$PRP@Prefix” column.

Sheet Metal-      All sheet metal plates are named PLT-01, PLT-03, PLT-05 etc

Piece Mark=       06-PLT-04, 60-PLT-01, 06-ANG-2, 06-CHL-3

On each weldment profile in the library I have added a Prefix- that I would like to use for my numbering system. So each of my piece marks would be ANG-01, ANG-02, ANG-04 for Angle or CHL-02, CHL-04 etc. for Channel. I would like all of my sheet metal parts to be piece marked as PLT-01,-03,-6 etc

In regard to the numbering, in a perfect world I would have all of the like shapes start at 0 and increase +1 for each additional common shape. However, I think that will be extremely time consuming and may be reaching too far with my macro goals. That said a simple numbering system serialized starting at 0 and increases +1 with additional items. Also need to address how we would handle items that are “Not included in cutlist” as these should not be counted.

Thanking you all in advance!

Jim