Bill Karkula offered this tip for AutoCAD 2009: "Often I have to do a count of various blocks in a drawing. For example, my hospital has more than 4500 rooms. Of course, each has a door, many of which are fire doors. For these fire doors I have inserted a block called FD20minute and FD90Minute, etc. I have customized a button to do a count of all the blocks in the drawing, and bring the text window up. Here is the command:

^C^C_bcount;;textscr;

"When finished viewing the results, I just hit F2 to close the text window. Feel free to edit this tip any way you need; I use vanilla AutoCAD 2009."

NOTES FROM CADALYST TIP PATROL:
BCOUNT is a great tool from the Express Tools Menu. It will count every block in a file and list them, along with the number of its instances in the file, on the text screen. Once this data is listed, users can open the text screen and copy that data out to use. This customized button macro will relieve the user of several clicks. If users need more data, try out the DATAEXTRACTION command. This is a much more advanced and complicated command, but at the same time is much more powerful. However, the BCOUNT command is a very quick, simple, and easy to use feature to get data in a hurry.

Follow-up: Block Counting

Brock Narum sent this follow-up to the block counting tip: "Cadalyst's CAD tip #2210, Block Quantity, will quickly print the block quantity for an active drawing to the text screen similar to the Bcount command, but will also include xrefs and dynamic blocks."