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welcome my name is jeff bartles i'm an infrastructure technical specialist here at autodesk and i'm joined today by my colleague jerry bartles our other colleague who's usually with us dana judge was not able to make it today she was called away to another engagement in today's 30 minute workout we're going to look at how we can use fields to create smart text in civil 3d now if you're unfamiliar with the 30 minute workout concept i'm sure you'll agree if you've ever taken a civil 3d course in the past you know there's never enough time to cover everything that the application has to offer typically during a class you focus on the need to know functionality what do you need to know to do your job the other features and tools and workflows are the type of things that you just pick up on your own over a career using the application so our goal in putting together these 30 minute workouts was to create a resource that can be used to fill in some of those gaps and provide users the most value for their autodesk investment couple ground rules since these sessions are just 30 minutes long our goal is to always start on time and end on time many of the examples that we show during the session will be abstract in nature we do that for a reason this way we can focus solely on how a tool works once you understand the function of the tool you can apply it to whatever situation works best for you these sessions are always recorded so you don't have to worry about taking notes if you don't want to everybody who has registered for the session will receive a copy of the recording if you have questions during the session go ahead and put those into the q a pane jerry is going to be fielding those as we go likewise if you would like a follow-up one-on-one call with one of us go ahead and put that in the qa pane as well we always enjoy speaking with other users our agenda today we're going to talk about a concept called fields fields are essentially smart text and the feature was introduced in autocad 2005. we'll do a quick introduction of those today and then we're going to look at how we can use fields in some practical examples i have a few of them listed here on screen that being said there is way more we can do with fields than just what is listed here our goal today is to get you acclimated to the tool and get you engaged with it and ready for further exploration we'll talk about some of the settings that are associated with fields and then i've got bonus content on there i've kind of held a couple things back in the event we get to everything that i want to talk about today and we still have some time left in the session then we can get into the bonus content if not not a problem we can just push that to a future session as always this is going to be a powerpoint free zone we are going to be working live in the application for the duration of our time together today so now that our housekeeping is taken care of let me adjust a couple of interface things here on screen first let me start by saying that i'm working in civil 3d 2021 having said that what we look at today is going to work regardless of the version of civil 3d or autocad you may be using i happen to be in a drawing currently that is kind of represents a portion of a subdivision plan if i zoom in you can see that i have a storm sewer network here and i have a civil 3d label that's been applied to this structure the nice thing about the civil 3d labels is they point to the data associated with their respective objects so if the data behind this object changes for instance let me come over to my properties palette here and maybe we'll renumber this manhole 500 as soon as i hit enter you can see how that label updates likewise if i click this structure and move it over when i drop this watch the station and offset label you can see how that updates accordingly by having these civil 3d labels they're essentially maintenance free because as my design changes these labels update automatically now knowing that not everything in your civil 3d project may be a civil 3d object like alignments profiles sections things like that you may at times need to label autocad objects or maybe you need to label some metadata that's tied to the drawing in that case we wouldn't use a civil 3d label that wouldn't apply so you may be wondering if there's other ways to create maintenance-free labels and we can do that using a concept called fields i'm going to jump to another drawing this drawing represents a plan and profile let me jump to model space for a second i just want to show you how this was built you can see my viewframe group that was used to create the layouts the three layouts exist in this file so when i jump out here we can see this is the sheet that we would typically plot now i would like to create a plot stamp i want to create some text on this title block and i want the text to label the file name of this file let's zoom in to get this label i'm going to create a field fields are essentially text that's all they are it's just text that points to metadata associated with your drawing or the objects in the drawing since fields are text we can incorporate them into single line text multi-line text multi-leaders tables and block attribution pretty much any place you can create text you can incorporate a field let's say i would like to create a little plot stamp here that's going to have the file name of this file i'm going to come up on the annotate ribbon tab and create some multi-line text i'll drag out to set my column width and then if i zoom in i could type file name colon and then right here if i wanted to i you know i could see the file name right there i could type the file name in unfortunately that would just be static so if this file was saved with a different name i would have to take and update this label manually instead i'm going to use a field i'm going to point to the metadata associated with this file that holds that file name to insert a field there's several ways we can do it one way is by clicking the field button here in the contextual ribbon or if i right click in the text editor i can choose insert field from here or we can use the keyboard shortcut control f this is actually my favorite way to use it i use that most of the time when the field dialog box comes up we can see the sheer number of metadata items that we can label in our drawing now if we look at the top left corner of the screen we can see that currently we're looking at the all categories so this is the list of all of them if you're familiar with the fields that you want to get you can just grab them from here likewise if you want to shorten this list up make it a little more manageable you can select a different category for instance i'm going to choose document in this case these are all the fields from that entire list that are associated with documents from here i'll select file name i'm going to extract the file name property from this drawing and incorporate it into a label once i choose that field i can see the formatting of how that field is going to look in the drawing i can adjust the formatting using these options down below i'm going to leave that all as uppercase for right now since i'm selecting a file name notice i've got additional toggles here i could label the file name only i could label the path only or i could label the path and file name typically i use this option that way on the printed sheet i can see the name of the file and i know exactly where it's saved on the server i also have a toggle here i can use to turn off the file extension let's go with this i'll click ok and then i'll click on screen and i'll back up notice that the field has a gray background this visually separates it from other texts so i can tell where the fields are fortunately the gray background does not plot in the event you didn't want to see that background there is a system variable called field display by default that's set to 1 which means it's turned on if i set that to 0 and press enter you can see that it turns it off i'm going to put things back the way they were we'll go to recent input here field display and i'll turn that back on okay so this is now maintenance free text every time i save this drawing it's going to maintain the location and it's going to have the file name let's go a little bit further since this is multi-line text i'm creating here will add to my plot stamp maybe i'd like to incorporate when this file was last saved i'll put saved on and then i will do control f and then for that i'm going to go to i think if i go to date and time that category notice there's a field that tells me when the file was last saved if i look over to the right we can see the sheer number of options that we have for creating that text i'm going to label this with the date and the time all the way down to the seconds let's click ok and then we'll find out who saved it i'll type buy colon and then control f to put in another field for this i think if i go to document yeah there's a field here last saved by it'll grab the login name of who saved this file last so i'll choose that and here we can see my login name at the top note that we can adjust the formatting using these options below i'm going to go with all uppercase here let's click ok and then i'll click on screen fields are just text that's just an m text item but i've got some entries that are in there that happen to be looking at metadata associated with this file let's test it i'm going to save this drawing to save it i'll come up and click save as and i'm going to save this in the same directory where my other drawings are stored i'm going to call this sample and when i click save watch the file name watch the save date can see how those update so this is now a truly maintenance-free piece of text but you can add this to a title block that you use for all of your drawings and then as you drag it into files it's automatically going to grab that information let's take it a little bit further since this is a plot stamp i may want to include the date when this was plotted plot it on ctrl f and i'm going to use maybe the plot category there we go plot date this will grab metadata that's associated with when this file was printed i'm going to use the same formatting for the date and i'll click ok and then i'll click on screen notice the field in this case anytime you see the four dashes it means that there's no data in that category which stands to reason because this file has not been printed let's go ahead and print it i'm old fashioned i'm just going to type plot we'll plot the individual sheets this is going to print to pdf i'll just save this on my machine and when that's finished let's zoom in here a little bit we'll drag down and you can see there's my plot stamp so now every time i have a printed sheet i've got the file name and where it's located i know who saved it and when and i can tell when the sheet was printed all of it's handled through fields all of it's automated it's just extracting that metadata from the drawing itself let's close this and then i'm going to close my little bubble there note when i come back to the drawing the field here has not yet been updated fields are updated when you plot when you save or when you do a regen you can see that i had the correct information in my plot so we never have to worry about that if i want this to update on screen i can simply type re to regen the drawing and then i can see that now after you've seen this you may be wondering if there's ways to create your own metadata that you can incorporate into a drawing and then incorporate into labels and we can do that as well if i go to the application menu we'll come down to drawing utilities and i'll choose drawing properties on these tabs we will find properties that we can fill out that we can extract using fields you can see title subject author comments if i come down to the custom tab i can actually create my own properties i once had someone ask me if it was possible to identify what civil 3d template was used to create a file well there's no programming way to do that but i could tag the template and then any drawing that's been created from that i could have a field that pulls that value we can do that very easily from here i can say add i want to add a custom property and i'll call this template version and then i can give this a value we'll say 2021 and i'll click ok let's click ok i would do that in my template file and then every new drawing that's created from that template would automatically have that custom property associated with the file and then in my title block for instance let me come down to the plot stamp that i've been working on i'm going to type template used and then i'll press ctrl f to grab a field and i could get this from the all category or to kind of narrow things down i'm going to choose document when i choose document notice here's some of those things that we saw a second ago author comments keywords subject title there's that template version that's the custom property that i made i can select that choose my formatting and i'll click ok click on screen so if that plot stamp was incorporated into the template file that you use for your layouts as you drag layouts in it's automatically going to extract that property and it would be very easy to tell which template was used to create the file so this is an example of using fields to label metadata associated with a drawing we can also use fields to label data that's associated with the objects in our file that's probably the most powerful way to use fields let's look at that i'm going to go to this other drawing here i have a plaid of survey and over on the right just beneath the north arrow we can see some text that labels the scale of this drawing if i double click in the viewport we can see that matches the scale that's assigned to the viewport which is good let me double click out wouldn't it be nice if i could have this text tied to the viewport such that if the scale of the viewport changed this text would change automatically we can do that let me go to the home tab and i am going to turn on my viewport layer and then i'm going to double click to edit this text now this is just single line text in here i'm going to delete this text and i will insert a field ctrl f the field i'm going to use in this case is object i would like to extract a property from a selected object and incorporate that into a label let's click the select object button what object am i looking at this viewport here we can see all of the properties that i can extract from that viewport and put into a label these would all be maintenance-free items that i could label from here i'm going to choose standard scale and you can see that scale that's the name that's associated with the scale on the viewport that looks good let me click ok i will then press escape notice we see the gray boundary that is now a field and it is dynamically linked to this viewport so if i change the scale of this to maybe 40 scale as soon as i do a regen we see that update once again we'll put things back the way they were let's open that up i'll flip that back to 30 and i'll do another regen let's look at another example i'm going to go back to my sample drawing that i made another place where people use fields especially in a civil 3d environment is to label assemblies all of the label styles that we have in civil 3d are fantastic one that we don't have yet we really don't have an assembly label style one that would put the name of the assembly down below even though i don't have it in civil 3d i can create a maintenance free label using a field i'm going to go to my annotate ribbon tab here and i will select a text style that has the appropriate height and then i'm just going to create some text i'll type text this will just be single line could be multi-line could be a multi-leader if i wanted to i'll click to place that and then i'll hit ctrl f to put in a field i would like the field to be based on an object let me click select objects and i'll select the assembly this shows me all the properties that i can extract from that assembly i'm going to choose name and you can see that's pulling the name of the assembly for me i can adjust the formatting i'm going to go with uppercase i'll click ok when finished this is now a maintenance free label in the event i select that assembly and change its name i'm going to call this road for instance as soon as i do a regen we can see that update now what if i wanted to use this label for another assembly i'm going to copy it i'm horribly old-fashioned i just typed that in let's copy this down to make this work i just have to point this field to this object so how do we edit a field well first i'm going to double click to get access to the text editor to edit a field couple ways we can do it i can right click on it and choose edit field or i can simply double click the field itself it'll take me right back into the editor in fact it remembers all the previous settings it's object i'm going to select object i will select this object for this label and i want its name and i'll click ok so now this is a maintenance free label associated with this assembly fantastic let's look at another example we'll take this concept a little further i can use fields to do calculations in this example i have three circles a b and c i would like to label the total area of those circles this is just a single line text item i'm going to put my cursor where i want that field to go and then i'll press ctrl f and then the field i'll use is formula formula allows you to extract properties from selected objects and then apply calculations to them just imagine what you can do with that i'll come down to the expression area here and to build my formula i can essentially have fields within fields if i right click for instance i can say insert field i would like an object-based field tied to this object i would like to extract the area you can see some of the other items here we can pull from a circle i'd like the area and i'm going to keep the default formatting let's click ok and then i will add right click insert field object which object let's add this one i want its area and i'll click ok and then finally i'll click add right click insert field object which object circle c i want the area and i'll click ok so here's my formula when i'm finished with my formula i'll click evaluate that will do the calculation up here at the top and then i can use these buttons to adjust the formatting i can change the units if i want to currently decimal is what i'm going to go with precision maybe we'll knock that down to two decimal spaces you can see as i make the adjustments the preview updates i can also go into additional format if i want to make even more changes i can apply a conversion factor if i want to i can add a suffix i'm going to type square feet if you add a suffix make sure and put a space in front of it that'll give you a space between the field and the suffix it's nice you can see the preview here you can see exactly what you're going to get you can assign number separators for instance if this ever gets into the thousands i want to include a comma and then i can suppress zeros if i want to i'm just going to keep the rest of the defaults and i'll click ok and ok now if these items change when i do a regen you can see that that area updates accordingly knowing that let me mention that the calculations that you do are only limited by your creativity if i copy this down maybe i'd like to get the average area of these shapes here i'd like to edit this field i'll double click on it and then we'll take the formula and maybe we'll put parentheses on either side and then i will divide this by three let's click evaluate there is the average area i could adjust the formatting if i want to for right now i'm just going to come down and click ok those are now maintenance free labels as i make adjustments here and do a regen you can see how everything updates typically when we create formulas within the autocad or the civil 3d platform a lot of times we do it inside a table fields work great when we're working with tables they kind of go hand in hand here i have a table this is just an autocad table that i created a little earlier and i have a polyline that i've generated that will say represents a bituminous pad i would like to use these items together to do some calculations first i'd like to pull the area of this shape into my table to do that i'll double click in this cell to get access to the text and then i will press ctrl f i'm going to create a field i want to create a field based on an object which object this polyline i'd like to extract the area and i'm going to keep the default formatting and i'll click ok and then i'll click on screen so we can see there's the field right there maybe i want to calculate volumes here you can see maybe i've got two courses surface course and aggregate i've already got some values in there if i'd like to calculate cubic feet i can do the calculations right here within the table and we can do it a lot like we do in microsoft excel i can say this is cell b2 times b4 enter and this one would be b2 times b5 maybe one day we can do a session just on tables these are very powerful in their own right now that i've done that as i make changes to the shape and i do a regen the area is pulled from the shape to the table and it takes and updates these volumes we can go even further i can pull data from a table cell into another annotation we'll do one of these just for the sake of time maybe i'd like to pull the surface course volume and i would like that in cubic yards this is an m text item once again fields are just text that's all they are in this text item i'm going to press ctrl f to insert a field and i'm going to choose formula on the formula tab you can see these buttons these are the ones that allow us to use tables i'm going to choose cell it's asking me select table cell you'd like to extract i'll just click here and you can see there's the programming code that's going to pull the data from that cell and i would like that divided by 27 that's what will convert it into cubic yards let's click evaluate there's my value i would like that decimal maybe two decimal spaces let's put a suffix on this maybe cubic yards this looks good i'll click okay and okay and then i'll click on screen so now if i change my object and do a regen that updates the table which updates the volumes which then turns around and updates annotations this is just a simple example imagine some of the things that you can do just with fields to create maintenance-free annotations let's do one more thing we can also use fields to navigate a drawing or drawings many times we navigate files using the hyperlink tool and you know if you try and put a hyperlink into an auto kit or a civil 3d drawing it's kind of a double edged sword because you add the hyperlinks but you really unless you know they're there how do you know what to click on using fields i can create a hyperlink and i can actually put text in there that says hey click here to go someplace else in this case i've got just some view frames just imagine if i could maybe put a piece of text in here that says you know click this text to visit the layout associated with these viewframes now in this case the layouts are in this drawing but they don't have to be let me zoom in and i'm going to change my text style here maybe we'll do viewports and i'm going to create a text label i'll just type text could use mtext okay it's just a text object i'm just using single line for the interest of speed once i put the label in i'll hit ctrl f to add a field and then i could grab this from the entire list but if i use the linked category it's a little easier to find there's hyperlink i'll click hyperlink and with hyperlinks we can link to a file we can link to a webpage or we could link to a target a target would be your tabs essentially model space or the three layouts targets would also be a saved view so if i click target in this drawing i can see those items right here i would like this to link to layout one and then this is the text that i would like to appear i'll just say control click here to view layout and i'll click ok and okay now that that's been created it's outside the viewframe so it's not going to show up on the sheet but if i hover over this you can see that icon if i control click at this point it'll take me right to that layout at this point you may be wondering you know what could i create a link like that that could take me to another drawing and the answer is yes we can if i back up right here i have a couple of block symbols that represent road closure barricades if i jump to my general notes drawing you can see here on the general notes layout i've got a detail for the road closure i would like it maybe to have a hyperlink where i could click by those symbols to go right to this detail and instead of going right to the layout i'd like to go to a view of that detail so let me zoom in on that and i'll create a saved view to do that i'll just type view i'll click new and then i'll give it a name i'll call it closure detail let's click ok i will then click ok i will save let me just verify because i'm going to close this there we go we can see that that's associated with the layouts and i will jump out of this drawing let's go back to my sample file and let's create some text here text i'll click on screen and i'm going to type control f i want to insert a field i'm going to insert a hyperlink i want a hyperlink to a file now i want to go to a separate file let me choose that and i'll click ok once i've selected the file i can come down and choose target now it will show me the information within that file i can see there's the two tabs and on the general notes tab here's a saved view let me go ahead and click ok on that and then i can change this text to say control click here to view detail so in this case the text that i'm creating you might put that on a layer that's set to no plot okay you can handle this however you like the nice thing is just trying to show you that with a field we can create smart text that will take you to another drawing if i control click on this it will find that drawing it will open it it will take me to that layout and then it will zoom in on that specific view that we saved that's that let's close out of this and i just want to show you one more thing we are quickly coming up on the top of the hour it's not really common but in the event you wanted to convert a field back into text if i go into the editor here if i right click on a field there's an option here i can say convert field to text if i choose that now it's not hyperlink anymore it's just generic text so if you felt you had to do that that would be the way you could convert it into regular text okay let's go back to the powerpoint here so today we talked about the concept of fields fields represent text that's just pointed to metadata that metadata can be drawing related or it can be tied to the objects in your file i would strongly recommend that you experiment with this and just you know look for different ways that you can create these smart maintenance free labels in your drawings that being said if you're labeling a civil object you're better off using a civil 3d label style that's the best way to go because that's going to be tied to all the data these type of field labels would be good for drawing metadata and any place where a civil 3d label would not be applicable we could use these for calculations we looked at how we can use the hyperlinks to navigate drawings we just scratched the surface on what's possible here just want to make sure you're aware of that jump in and take a look at these little closer you'll be amazed at what you can do we also talked about just a couple of the settings field display allows us to turn off that gray background and we saw how we could convert them back into typical text if we wanted to with that i'm going to ask jerry if there are any questions at this point that have gone unanswered we are all caught up with questions all right fantastic thank you so much for being with us let me also give a special thank you the sessions that we've had to this point we've had a very nice large contingent of folks that have been attending that are outside the united states we've got a bunch of global attendees and we want to tell you that we know you're out there and we really appreciate you guys coming by because we know that in many cases you're attending the session outside of normal business hours so we can't thank you enough for spending time with us once again on behalf of jerry bartles and myself i want to say thank you guys for coming and we'll see you again in a couple of weeks