How to use AutoCount Plus
Counting symbols on electrical drawings, without clicking each one. Ten minutes here will save you a lot of time later.
1 · Counting your first drawing
- Make a project — one per job.
- + Add plans for individual PDFs, or + Add folder to bring in a whole folder at once. Folders on your computer become folders in the project.
- Open a drawing. Click Select symbol and drag a box around one example of the symbol you want. A rough box is fine.
- The clean-up window opens. Blue parts are included in the symbol; grey parts are ignored. Left-click to include, right-click to exclude. Remove the background lines that happen to sit near your symbol, then press Count this symbol.
2 · Projects, folders, and why symbols spread
A project holds a job's drawings. Inside it, folders group drawings that belong together — lighting, power, panels, a floor.
Symbols belong to the folder, not to one drawing. Count a socket on one drawing and every other drawing in that same folder learns about it. Open one and you'll see the whole folder's symbol list straight away, with a count of 0 for anything not yet looked for — then it fills itself in quietly.
Count all
On the project page, Count all looks for every symbol the project knows about on every drawing that is missing them. It reads each drawing, so it takes a while — the bar tells you which drawing it is on. You can keep using the app while it runs.
Stop after this drawing finishes the drawing it is on and then stops, rather than abandoning it half-counted. Everything found so far is kept.
Project symbols
The ◎ Symbols button shows every symbol in the project on one page, grouped by folder, with totals and which drawings each was found on. From there you can rename, recolour, set strictness, delete, and merge — drag one shape onto another symbol and they become one, on every drawing at once.
3 · When a symbol won't count properly
Every symbol has a strictness — how much of its shape has to be found before the app accepts a match. It starts at 100%: every part must be there. Change it from the small box in the symbol's row, or on the Project symbols page.
| Problem | What to do |
|---|---|
| Finds far too few — misses obvious ones | Lower the strictness for that symbol (try 80%, then 70%). Also re-check the clean-up window for stray background lines. |
| Finds too many — counts things that aren't the symbol | Raise the strictness (90–100%), or include more of the symbol's own detail when you clean it up so there is more to match against. |
| Symbol is filled with hatching | Lower it, often to 60–70%. See below. |
Hatched symbols
A solid hatch in AutoCAD does not survive the trip to PDF as one thing — it explodes into dozens of separate little lines, and they are never quite identical between one instance and the next. That is why hatched symbols are the hardest to count.
Lower that symbol's strictness to around 60–70%, so a match is accepted even though the hatch lines don't line up exactly.
4 · Leaving parts of a drawing out
Under Areas in the side panel:
- No-count zone — anything inside is ignored. Use it for the legend, the title block, or a detail drawn at a different scale.
- Named area — counted separately and given its own column in the Excel export. Use it per apartment, per floor, per wing.
Drag a rectangle for either. Switch to Free shape if the area isn't a rectangle, then tap corner by corner. Drag a corner of an existing area to adjust it.
5 · Checking your counts before you send them
- 🔎 Check counts walks you through anything suspicious — overlapping matches, symbols found in odd places.
- Right-click a counted symbol → Remove from count if the app found something that isn't really there. It stays removed, even after a re-count.
- Click a symbol's ◎ to isolate it — everything else disappears so you can see exactly what was found.
- Use the 👁 to hide a symbol you have already checked.
6 · Excel and marked-up PDFs
On the project page:
- Excel totals — every drawing's counts in one spreadsheet, with named areas as their own columns.
- Marked PDFs — your drawings with every counted symbol coloured in, so whoever receives them can see what was counted and check it.
If some drawings haven't been counted for symbols the project knows about, the app says so before exporting and offers to count them first — so you don't send short numbers.
7 · On a tablet
- With a pen: the pen draws and marks, your finger moves the drawing. Change this under Settings → Touch & pen if you'd rather work another way.
- Pinch to zoom, drag to pan.
- In the clean-up window, use the include / exclude buttons to choose what a touch does — there is no right-click on glass.
- Install it like an app: your browser's menu → Install or Add to Home Screen. Then use Settings → Check for updates, since there's no address bar to reload from.
8 · Tips worth knowing
- Middle mouse button pans, in the drawing and in the clean-up window.
- Ctrl+scroll zooms. Esc cancels an area you're drawing; Enter finishes it.
- Ctrl+click a drawing card to select several, then drag any one of them to move them all into a folder — or delete them together.
- Drag drawings to reorder them, so they read in the order the job runs rather than alphabetically.
- Drag a folder from your computer straight onto the project to add it as a group.
- Colour the symbol (Settings) marks counts by tracing the symbol itself instead of drawing a box over it — much easier to read on a busy drawing.
- Your work saves itself. The word saved appears next to the drawing's name.