From the course: AutoCAD 2025 Essential Training

Adding fields to an AutoCAD table in your drawing - AutoCAD Tutorial

From the course: AutoCAD 2025 Essential Training

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Adding fields to an AutoCAD table in your drawing

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- [Instructor] We're staying in our Simple Objects.dwg file with our recently created table. We're now going to add some field data to our table and then we're going to total up the areas of our three objects. So I'm going to double click in the cell that relates to the area of the rectangle. I'll double click like so. Now I've got the option of using the field command up here on the insert panel, or I can right click and I can also insert field on the shortcut menu. They both do the same. Now, when you first use the field command, it all looks a bit weird. There's a lot of different fields available in an AutoCAD drawing. We are using objects, so we need to set our category to objects. Then it starts to get a bit more self-explanatory. We now need to go to object in the field name like so, and we can use this little icon here to select the object. So we click there, click on the rectangle, and now we've got all the information about that rectangle. So there's the area there, and there's the area in millimeters. Now it's using the decimal format there and the current precision. I'm going to change that. We don't need any decimal places, so it's going to be 812500. So I click on, okay, and there's my 812500 area. And we're going to repeat that now for the circle. So I'll double click again and I'll go up to field this time here on the text editor on the ribbon, field. And luckily it remembers that we're using objects and objects, so I just need to click on select object and select the circle. And again, it's remembered the precision with no decimal places. So I can click on OK. Now you'll notice these areas have a background masking. That's to let you know that it's a field and not just a piece of text. They won't plot when you plot a drawing. And then we'll do, last but not least, double click in the hexagon cell, click on field again, and we'll select the hexagon. And again, you can see the preview, click on OK. Now I'm just going to click away from the table and there's all our values set up there. Now it would be nice to have the total area of our three objects. So what I'm going to do now is click once in the total area cell. And you'll notice in the insert panel, in the table cell tab, I've got formula. So I want sum, I want to add them up. And I'm just going to click and drag over those three cells that have my areas in them. So it's a click, drag click. And you'll notice it's got a formula there that looks very reminiscent of Microsoft Excel. Now the good thing is if I close the text editor now, there's my value, but the formatting is different. So what I might need to do here is click in this cell and go to data format. So in the table cell tab, data format, custom table, cell format. And what I'm going to do is change that again to no decimal places, so there's no decimal places after the value. Click on OK, and now it looks nice and neat and tidy. Click away from the table. Hit escape a couple of times. Job done. So you've now got the area of each shape and the total area of all of the shapes in your Simple Objects.dwg file.

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