From the course: AutoCAD 2026 Essential Training

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

From the course: AutoCAD 2026 Essential Training

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Adding fields to an AutoCAD table in your drawing

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- [Instructor] Once again, we're staying in our simple objects.DWG file and in the previous video we placed our simple table using our shape areas table style. What we're going to do now is we're going to occupy the table with data from the drawing. And it is a very simple process. We're going to take the area of each of these close shapes. So we've got a rectangle there, which is a polyline. We've got a circle and we've got a polygon as well. And you'll notice the polygon is also a polyline even though it's a polygon shape. Now the way to do this is to insert field data into your AutoCAD table. Now you can do this in a number of ways. I can click once in that cell like that and you'll notice I can go up to field here on the insert panel like so. Or the other way of doing it, I'll just hit escape a couple of times, is to double click inside the cell itself as if you're going to put some data in there and you'll see there on the insert panel, you've got field as well. You can do it either way. It doesn't matter. Both of them work in the same way. I'll hit escape a couple of times, click once in the rectangle area cell like that. I'm going to go up to the insert panel here and click on field. Now as soon as I do that, you'll get a weird dialogue box appear. Now you'll notice there it says field at the top. It is the field dialogue box. The important one is the field category. Click on the fly out there. And you want objects, like so. Now this is where you start honing down that big list of fields that are available. And you'll see right at the bottom you have object like that. Now at the moment, there's no properties available because we haven't selected an object type. Click on this little button here, select object, and then you go click on the rectangle. And as you can see, now it's a polyline. And the property that we want is the area. There's other properties that we can bring into the table if we want to. Now the preview there is 812500.0000. Now we don't want that. We don't want that current precision. So we are going to take that to no decimal places. We override the unit's precision in the drawing like so, 'cause we only need the whole number. Now there are additional formats available. We can convert things, we can have prefixes, suffixes. I'm not going to worry about that, but just make sure your precision there has no decimal places. When I click on okay, that value goes into that cell in the table. Now if I just hit escape a couple of times now and click away, can you see there that obviously that has got like a gray background to it, that's letting me know that it's field data and it's related to an object in the drawing. So let's do the same with the circle. Click once in the cell up to field there on the insert panel. And you'll notice it remembers objects. So all I've got to do is go over here, select object, click on the circle, it remembers the precision as well, which is great. So I click on okay, and it adds that value as well. I can click once into this cell now as well. Now you'll notice when I'm clicking, I can't do anything. Look at the command line. We are currently in edit table cell. So in order to get out of this, I need to basically hit escape a couple of times, like that just to cancel it. And then that makes life a bit easier. I can click once in the cell again, go up to field again, object, select object. You're going to select the hexagon this time. And again, there's the little preview of the area. Click on okay, hit escape a couple of times to come out of edit table cell. And you can see there now that you've got your areas of each of your shapes. Now that background masking is really important because it lets you know that it's field data. Don't worry about it showing up when you plot your drawing. It won't. It doesn't. It's called background masking and it doesn't show up when you plot a drawing. Now last but not least, we need to be able to calculate the total area of our three simple objects. How do we do that? Well, we can click once in this cell, the total area cell. And again, we're in the table cell contextual tab. If we go up here to the insert panel, again, you can see that we have formula. Now we have some simple formulas, very similar to what you might use in something like Microsoft Excel. We're going to go for sum, as in we're going to add them up, we're going to sum them up. And then you just literally click and drag over the three cells like that. Click again. And you've selected those three cells. So it's click once drag, click again, over those three cell values. And you'll see, now hang on, there's an equation equals the sum of B3 to B5. There's column B, B3 to B5 just like Microsoft Excel. Now if I go up here and close the text editor, the magic happens. And as you can see, it gives me the total value. But can you see there as well, the precision needs to change. So if I click once in that cell, what I've got to do is change my data format here, cell format. And what we'll do, we'll go to custom table cell format and we just need to change it from current precision to no decimal places. Click on, okay and then it matches the other cells in the table. And again, just hit escape a few times and you've now got the area of each of your shapes. Now I'll just show you something very cool here, that's very clever actually. If I select my rectangle and I click on that grip there and make it a bit bigger like that, that shape is now bigger. If I hit escape a couple of times to deselect it and then type regen to regenerate the drawing, keep an eye on the area for rectangle in the table, it updates and the total area updates as well. How cool is that? So I've got shapes in my drawing that when I change them and I regenerate the drawing, the table updates for me. And that's what that field data is all about. If I just undo that and go back to my regular shape there, notice it doesn't regenerate automatically. You just type regen for regenerate. You can also save the drawing and it'll regenerate. And again, it updates back to where we were before. So that's why you want to use tables in your AutoCAD drawings. It allows you to tabulate your data, but more importantly extract data from the drawing that you can use in a real time environment. As you can see, they want to change the area of the rectangle.

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