Reports

While Designer Plus is drawing it uses information you have saved in the setup programs and information you enter at the cabinet type and modifications windows to draw the cabinet and create a list of parts for the item being drawn. This list is in the drawing and can be viewed and edited by turning on 'display attributes'. The reports made by Designer Plus are a compilation of these attributes and are ASCII text files. Each line of this file is the data for one item, a cabinet nomenclature, a door nomenclature, a cabinet part or a door part depending on which report you ask Designer Plus to make.

To use this information you need other software to sort and do math for you. A spreadsheet is made for just such a purpose, you load the report file into the spreadsheet and because it is not a spreadsheet document it will ask you what to do with it. Have your spreadsheet parse the data into cells, this will take each line of text from the report file and break it at the spaces and put each piece into a cell in a horizontal line. When it is done parsing the list looks much the same as it did as an ASCII file except now it is broken up into cells.

Once you have reached this point the spreadsheet can sort the data by any criteria you want, this is how you make a cutting list. By grouping parts using the same material as the sort criteria and copying them to another page you have a cutting list. By saving this list fixed width (number of spaces in the cell) you can import it into cut list optimizing programs. Or you can total lengths and make bulk order and cutting lists in the spreadsheet.

Click for a parsed and sorted cutting list