How to Create a Cutting List From an AutoCAD Drawing

A cutting list — the bill of materials the workshop actually cuts from — is only useful if it is complete. One forgotten shelf means a second trip to the saw, a second setup, and a part that arrives after the cabinet was supposed to be assembled. The hard part is not writing the list — it is being certain that nothing was left out.

Why the manual list is never quite finished

Working through a carcass by eye, part by part, is fine for a single cabinet. Across a kitchen run it stops being reliable: the parts you can see get listed, the divider hidden behind a door does not, and nobody spots the gap until the panels are already cut.

Then the design changes. A drawer becomes two, and the list made yesterday is silently out of date — but it looks exactly as finished as it did before.

Let one command walk the whole carcass

The CABINET command processes every cabinet part in the drawing in a single pass. It cannot skip a part, because it is not choosing — it is going through all of them. Parts on hardware (VAS_) layers are ignored automatically, so the hinges and slides do not end up in the board list.

Each part is passed through the same dialog you would use individually, so you can still set the description, quantity, edge banding and grain direction — you are just not the one keeping track of what has been done.

Identical parts counted, not repeated

Within the batch, identical parts are detected by dimensions and hole pattern and grouped with the quantity filled in. Left–right mirror pairs are recognised as pairs rather than duplicates. Eleven identical shelves become one line with a quantity of eleven — you fill it in once.

Into Excel

When the batch is done, open the companion workbook and click Import Parts. The complete list appears with sizes, quantities and banding, ready to price, to send to a supplier, or to feed into cutting optimization.

What you end up with

• Every board part in the drawing, because the command does not skip
• Sizes read from the geometry, not measured
• Identical parts grouped with quantities; mirror pairs kept as pairs
• Hardware kept out of the board list automatically
• An Excel sheet you can act on immediately

Change the design and run it again — regenerating the list takes a moment, so an out-of-date list stops being something you have to worry about.