SketchUp Pro can generate tabular reports (fancy lists, basically) from the groups and components in your models. It's a simple operation, and provided you've set things up properly, it can save you a ton of time. Let's look at a pretty straightforward example: a picket fence.
I’m designing a simple wooden fence (SketchUp model) to encircle my yard. The fence is made from copies of three different components: Posts, Rails, and Pickets. Here's what it looks like:
My pickets fence is made from instances of three components.
I need to know how much lumber to buy, so I use SketchUp Pro to generate a report (File > Generate Report...) in CSV format which I can open in any spreadsheet program. I use Google Docs so that my spreadsheet is online. Take a look at the resulting raw report in its entirety, or view the screenshot below:
A CSV-format report from SketchUp Pro, imported into Google Docs' spreadsheet tool. (Click to enlarge)
Looking closely at the report, you can see that each component gets its own row and that each row contains a whole bunch of information contained in a number of columns. Each column represents a different attribute associated with the component; attributes are things like "Definition Name", "Layer" and "LenZ" (length in the Z, or blue, direction).
I'm only interested in using this report to figure out how much wood I need, so I delete all of the attribute columns except the following:
