Panelised board with duplicate designators

[LesGrant]

I have a panel containing 4 pairs of small identical boards. The designators (U1, R2, etc) are duplicated 4 times. I have fiducials in the tooling strips (borders). My pick and place file is for the whole panel. I was hoping to treat the panel as one single board. When I 'Place All', the machine only places one of each part (ok, I only tried 1 part) and then says 'all parts placed'.

I know about the 'Panelize' button but that seems like more work than I should have to do given that I have panelised data. Is there a way to handle duplicated designators? If there isn't, could there be? Please?

Thanks.
Regards,
Les Grant.

[JuKu]

Good point. I’ll have a look if that is easy to add. In the meanwhile, maybe there is an easy way to do that in Excel; Excel reads and writes csv.

[LesGrant]

My 'crude but effective' solution was to edit the csv file with Notepad. I simply changed 4 x U1 to U1a, U1b, U1c, U1d, etc. There were only 17 parts per board to change. It only took a couple of minutes.
I hope it is an easy feature to add. For me, it will be a common problem solved. Would you like a sample csv file?