Back to Basics: Introduction to Tables in AutoCAD LT 2017

well good morning and welcome once again to another build your AutoCAD IQ webinar presented by us here in global product support hope everybody's having a great week first day of fall can't wait to get into the rainy and crummy weather here it's just something to look forward to yay all right so today as it says there on your screen we are going to be covering tables and all the various things you can do with tables maybe not all of them maybe not every last thing but we'll kind of cover all quite a bit of it as always we are micro tato myself Zach Travis and I'm on my sir Juan is our moderator helping out in the questions answer section so feel free to post as many questions as you can think of regarding tables anyway before we get started as always there is the aforementioned chat window if we have some time left over at the end and we probably will this time I think we always say that way I was run out of time anyway well hopefully we'll have some time to get through some questions that you might have might have always wanted to ask about the feature we're going to be covering which is tables today you can see the links there the red session is being recorded it's going to be put up on our YouTube channel in the normal place and the slide deck and all the other resources drawing files data set etc will be made available so this is our webinar series it is a series containing four tracks this is the back-to-basics track and it is very very basic so if you're an advanced user you may not get anything out of it just for warning you this is no way intended to be a replacement for formal training in AutoCAD we are just here to highlight demonstrate some features that you might not have ever delved in to too deeply so we want to go through what's coming up in the next month of webinars here at the build your AutoCAD IQ webinar series beyond the basics is neck week and that is going to be working with fields a lot of really cool stuff you can do with fields and it's a fairly advanced feature that frankly not a lot of people take full advantage of I think so if I want to check that one out model documentation coming up the beginning of October model documentation is a new way of representing 3d models for layouts for plotting and and various other aspects in AutoCAD coming up in the tips and tricks section it's not really going to be so much tips and tricks it's going to be an introduction autocad civil3d and it is going to be a very basic intro hour presented by Mike who's on with us today he's going to be your guide there to introduce civil to anybody who's ever thought hey what is this civil 3d thing I hear about and and all my drawings pop up and say they've got civil 3d objects and I need to go get a civil 3d object in a blur so what is this thing called civil 3d so if you've ever wondered ever curious about it it's a good choice good time to check it out it's a good hour to attend and even if you can't make it of course check out the the YouTube posting of the video later on and then toward the end of October we've got Mike and I back with the back to basics track doing an introduction to external references and as many of you know external references are indispensable feature in AutoCAD so be sure to check that out we'll go through and some things and try to explore some areas that maybe not everybody's explored before and that should be fun so like I said the YouTube is up there all the files are posted on box made available to everybody so be sure to check that out now Network ever-expanding we are writing articles daily and modifying articles daily because we now have that power and it's fantastic the Autodesk knowledge Network made up of articles and troubleshooting tips and steps and everything you might need to hopefully get around any problems you might encounter running Autodesk software so there are some helpful links there and again all this available after the webinar in the normal locations so what are we covering today this week's agenda is tables I'm going to show some examples of tables we're going to talk about creating and modifying tables from scratch which is certainly something they can do something maybe even more commonplace is creating tables from data linked Excel spreadsheets CSV files other types of table formatted files table Styles table style manager we're going to cover what you can do in there and if we have time we are debating about this whether or not we'll get into formulas I think we will have some time to fit formulas and I think Mike's going to cover that in his latter part of his section there so before we get into it let's do some polls here as we always like to do just to gauge who our audience is maybe you've changed since last time we want to make sure we know who we're dealing with so we can cater our content appropriately so we're going to throw out some polls we'll go through them real quick as we can here show you the results that we'll get on to the content so as as always first one is is this your first AutoCAD webinar so we'll find out usually we get about 90% returned and a very small percentage of of new folks we do get some new folks every time though so it's always good to see and hopefully you come back and join us again so it looks like we've got about the majority voted so far so we'll go ahead and close this one out and share the results with you real quick here looks pretty good let's check another one here this is a good one we always want to find out what you're using so we'll launch this one out here which version of autocad products do you use what's up with that jeopardy music dude there's a question up alright so there's the results of that basically I was just tired of trying to fill during the polls so you know try to do something different so there's the result of that so most of you using AutoCAD AutoCAD LT it's good to see there that a few of you are using other products as well so let's move on to the next one now this one talks more about the tables specifically so let's take a look at that all right so we'll close this one out and share the results with you looks like a lot of you never using tables are almost never so that's an interesting thing to find out for sure so let's move on to the last one related to tables and so for this is you know I I guess is for those of you who do use tables there's the option of course that you don't so we'll take a look here all right not even on this one and for those of you wondering that was the bonus round music for wheel of fortune not quite as recognizable in as iconic as jeopardy but it serves its purpose just a little bit of filler all right let's close this one out here and I'll share the results with you some surprising results on some of these polls here but it's good data have good information to know all right so let's hide that all right let's get back into it here let's check out some tables and there's one fine one I might say that happens to be my dining room table and lastly there's this little one which is a pretty generic looking table really this is just an excuse to show you the cool Autodesk chair that at one point some customer made for us in appreciation for some great service that we had done through support it's handmade that chair is it's fantastic it's all yar now if you can tell from the picture but it's all hand done and it's well we're pretty proud to have it here in one of our meeting rooms all right so getting down to it for real let's check out how all this looks in AutoCAD and for that I will hand you over to Mike Mike take it away yep all right thanks up let's see let me show my screen here yeah all right tada here's another table whoo and put that one that's the last table Joe for the day I think unless you have something else up your sleeve Zach I don't think I'll take it last one okay all right well let's actually jump into tables and what there are what they are so tables are objects and AutoCAD they're used for holding text or blocks within a row and column format similar to a lot of your spreadsheet programs out there like dimensions and text you can apply a table style to update the contents of the table and how it looks tables have many different uses one another spectrum you could use it to keep consistent formatting across a bunch of notes that you may have you could also use tables to query report information about objects in your drawing so where are now where do you find tables in here it's actually up in the annotate tab if you were with us a few weeks back I think it was one or two webinars ago second I actually went through annotation objects in AutoCAD and this was one of the topics that we kind of jumped over he said hey look this is where tables are won't get into it because if we wanted to we could probably do an entire webinar on it and lo and behold we are fortune tellers we here we are doing an entire webinar on tables so up here it's kind of a similar format as all the other annotation objects you have the actual table button so you can create a table up here you have your table styles and then there's a few other links down here you have data link which actually Zack is going to be going over in a little bit don't want to steal his thunder and these other two buttons are also part of that linking data I'll leave it at that for now Zack will go into it a little bit so creating a table you could either select table up here or you can just type out table once you do that you get this nice little window it comes up few options near and similar to before mention the table Styles right now you see door schedule up there I'm going to keep that one you get to choose insertion options you can do datalink not going to touch on that one right now we're just going to start with an empty table just to play around with it you could decide how you want to insert it you can specify an insertion point in your drawing you can also specify a window one thing to notice if you do specify a window clearly you are kind of selecting a window in your drawing and you'll notice that some of the options here become grayed out because it'll automatically calculate this stuff for you so if you say hey I want well sir number column sir number rows well I'm going to draw a window and AutoCAD decide what size those columns and rows are going to be or you can go you know the other way around say I want columns to be this height or this whiff and my rows to be this height calculate as many columns and rows as you can for now we're going to do specify insertion point let's see how long that student doesn't really matter too much between nine columns three rows you can set your cell styles we're going to actually touch upon this a little bit more later on but for now now your first row is going to be title block or long on title block but it's gonna be the title of your table second one is going to be a header and then you can do the rest of them as data you can play around with this a little bit more but let's just keep it standard for now title header data press it okay so right now what it's asking for is what I want the title of my table to be two doors scheduled and now I have a nice dot because I was so zoomed out but here you go so nice little table select it and play around with all the cells in there you'll notice under the properties you could actually see what type of style those whose rows are following so if you recall from before I had made it's at the first row was titles then headers and then the rest is just data you can actually see a write up here so let's fill out my headers so we're going to do a door schedule let's fill this out here let's do with height sickness and type comments all right so now I have my title and some headers in there you know we decided what size we wanted everything to be but now that we actually have some data in there it's looking a little bit cramped so let's actually select the table you could you know change what with your columns are let's play around with fitness for now great thickness looks great now but matte material is a little bit squished so kind of how this behaves is if you just select and drag what it'll do is it'll take the space from the next column over if you do it to the right if you do it back it will just squish your current one something that you can do if you hold down control it'll bring them all out so see instead of squishing one or swishing the other just hold ctrl you can change the width of your column without playing around with the widths of the columns around it cool so it's looking pretty good so far let's say whoops I need some more columns or similar rows similar to you know other spreadsheet applications such as Excel if you select this row right click on it you can answer it rows above or below it that's insert one above I want another set of headers up here similar to again some other spreadsheet software you can select multiple cells and then merge them so I just selected right click you can merge so you can you know pull however you want it here you go you play around with it that way you could do the same thing for your columns you could you know insert column left or right let's just put here let's what do we want to put in there fire rating select so now I have a table it looks pretty nice you can play around with what it looks like and whoops all right kind of creative table to whatever fits your needs going into the table style there's two ways to access it access it up here right now we're using the door to store schedule you could also select this little arrow down here it's not super to ative you should also actually be able to type out table style yep you could also type out table style so I like three ways to get to it this kind of similar to the other annotation objects that we covered a little while back you can change what your tables look like I'm going to go into the modify tab here so you can kind of see what options you can play around with if you wanted to you could select a table for a table style so let's say you want to create a new table style and you had a table you kind of wanted to have that same look of but want to play around with it select this and then select the table although this one was just silly because I'm modifying the style for that table so it doesn't really makes too much sense there but if you're trying to create a new table style you can go about it that way you can play around with the direction so if you wanted to read it from the bottom up you can go ahead and do that and see how it changed also if you remember its earlier when we were actually creating the table we had the option of making the first the first row title second row header anything after that data you can play around with each individual's cell style so you can you know say hey I only want my title to I won't change the type to my title you can go ahead and play around in there now you have quite a few options to here you could decide what the fill is you could set you want to align it formatting similar to excel you could you know change how numbers show up in here so if you want like percentages points all text normal text play around with that so this type that one I'm going to come back to in a little bit because that is actually it's pretty cool it'll come into play when I'm trying to do what I'm trying to split up my table but for now let's bring this guy back to normal I think I had it this way now the other way around think did I keep it the same yeah there you go all right some cool tips and tricks the when you're selecting tables now in normal AutoCAD you have two ten two ways to select you can select this layer select this way one of them selects everything within your selection box and the other one selects everything that is completely contained in your selection box tape tables don't really work like that lets you select them it's anything that is inside or select well anything that your selection box is touching will be selected so you don't have to you know select an entire cell in order to pick it it'll automatically just select any of the cells that your selection boxes touching so it's a little bit of change their from how AutoCAD normally works but you know kind of just going off of industry standard this makes a little bit more comfortable and you don't have to you know change your behavior from well you do have to change behavior from when you're using AutoCAD but not when you're using other spreadsheet software now next little tip trick I'm going to show I'm going to add a few more rows because this one will be a lot easier to visualize with more rows okay so similar to excel you can actually move left and right well move to the right by pressing tab and you can move down by pressing enter so that's pretty you know pretty standard but that option is in there for you another thing that you might recognize AutoCAD will recognize numbers so for patterns if you have one two three four what's next well five will be next you could actually you know play around with that and it will recognize numbers it will not recognize letters all it will do if you put a letter in there is it'll just repeat so this should be a b c c it'll just repeat won't actually recognize letters when you're doing it however if you do a 1 a 2 a 3 it will recognize those so no patterns will recognize some of them not all of them but that's a handy little feature not writing down numbers left and right you have another option okay that's pretty cool you can right click into a cell as i mentioned in the very beginning you can you don't have to just insert text in there you could also insert blocks and that option actually comes in here so you have on the insert option over here you can see blocks filled you also have some formulas so if you want to create some equations you have that option in there count is a cool it lets you count the number of times an object shows up in your drawing this drawing is blank so I don't really have anything to count but that option is available for you so you don't have to go in and manually count objects in your drawing for field field is pretty cool one actually milker is going to be touching upon fields next week so definitely stay tuned for that as you can see there's quite a few different options in here for inputting fields it's a very powerful tool once you actually get the hang of how to use it it definitely helps automate a lot of things that would otherwise be very painful to do on your own the one that I am going to show you though is interning blocks so you can insert a block however I don't have one so let's that's way too big let's create a block actually press B to bring up the block command I'm going to select this guy put up here let me circle I want to insert them in the middle so now he is gone now let me go back in here right click insert block look for my circle that's okay and there he is so not just text you can also insert little blocks in here up top my head just could be useful if you you know have certain blocks that you want to do quantities for sits go like a I have like the symbol that's showing up in my drawing for my like sewer covers you could do the block that represent your sewer covers put this block in there and then select the block next to it and you know just do insert formula count and then count number of times if that block shows up in your drawing but you might have to do minus one for a formula so it doesn't count the one in your legend but that's getting real technical sorry getting very technical yes you can do it so the other thing that I was going to touch on is table breaks so when you select a table now this little arrow down here now notice how to the right something's populating you can actually split your table up into two separate tables so if you run out of space or you just want to make it look this way you can go ahead and go about it that way do your table break now this table looks a little bit strange because it doesn't have any you know table or headers attached to it in order to do that just select the table you notice that by selecting it they'll select you know both of them is still one table right over here properties and their table breaks you could repeat the top labels and it pushed it over because I had too many of the you know I'm not too many rows so kind of want to keep it the same size but you can go ahead and like selecting that option you know kind of copy the labels that you had from your original table over to those table breaks now the one thing that touched upon before that I wanted to bring back if you remember over here when you're actually modifying your table style you're talking about cell style we had our data header in title or the other way around title header data the reason that those labels were you know the titles and the headers were copied over it's because over here the type was set to label so data is normal data header was set to label and title was set to label so because these cell styles were set to label when I selected the repeat top labels that's why they copied over just as a quick demonstration if I go in here door schedule modify let's say I want to switch my headers to data now they don't show up anymore because now my headers are considered data and not labels so when I try to go to the repeat top labels it's not going to show up anymore so yeah that's a little bit of a primer on tables and table Styles there's definitely some other cool stuff that you can do in here and I will be tossing it over to Zack city could show you a little bit more about that and a linking data which is actually a very useful tool as well I stopped here and here you go Zack thank you Mike yeah let's make sure that everybody is looking at what they should be looking at here give it a moment to refresh there we go okay so like Mike said we're going to cover data linking and to give you a little bit of background data linking hasn't always been something you can do in AutoCAD but what has always been readily available is the option to take stuff from another program say Excel in this case right just copy some of these cells over here and if we come back over into AutoCAD we can just paste them in and that's fine now is this a table not really if we take a look and select the object bring up the properties palette it shows us that it's a no le object which is object linking and embedding which is pretty cool now if you want to maintain the linkage between euro le object and its source you can't just copy and paste in you've got to paste special so if we went back over here and we copied this and then we come back into AutoCAD there's an option to paste special on the clipboard let's see paste special right there now paste special gives us a few options normal pace doesn't maintain any link to the source from which you copied but if we paste a link we can either go as AutoCAD entities in this case the table hasn't always been an option or we can put it in as an oily object so if we do that it looks the same but there's a linkage here so that if you were to come back into the Excel spreadsheet and say make this a I don't know a heavy anchor bolt you go back into AutoCAD I guess it's thinking about it let's let's save that change there well I might not be able to switch back and forth between the programs here just trying to think what nothing's happening well in the interest of time let's just kill things off and start over again shall we that's no fun no big deal it can happen to Bill Gates it can happen to me okay now a little bit violently scream knock on wood okay so the the bottom line there is once you pay special with an oily object if you go back to the original Excel spreadsheet and make a modification there you'll get you know the update instantaneously within AutoCAD now that's good and you can resize the early object but you can't the formatting is is whatever it is you know in the original Excel spreadsheet now if we were to take that same bit and copy it and this time we'll do a paste special but instead of choosing a noelia object type we'll do it as AutoCAD entities this time what will happen as you can see there it's not the white oily object that we had before if we take a look at what this is now it's a table now in addition what you didn't see happen and what we'll go do from scratch here in a sec is it created a data link to the original spreadsheet and since it did it automatically it's just called it excel data link one so as you can see there's the file name it goes to the table XLS file and it's the range of cells that you had selected then you copied over so if you were to go back into the Excel spreadsheet make a change come back into AutoCAD you can update your data link with the linked data options here but what I really want to show is how you can go back and and do an entire spreadsheet you can do a range of cells like that or you can also go into data link and we're just going to nuke the one that's in here and start from scratch so let's create a new excel data link and we can call it whatever we want that's just what we'll call it so it's going to have us browse for a file so we'll do that it's going to be the same file we're going to try to generate a preview down here but it's too large to display because this Excel spreadsheet happens to have lots of rows in it now if you click this little fly on option down here you get more options and this deals with what's going to happen as far as formatting of your new table that you're going to create from the data link to Excel spreadsheet the default is to start with the Excel formatting but then do not update so if you make subsequent changes into the formatting of the Excel spreadsheet those changes will not get passed through to your table and AutoCAD or you can select this first option here to keep the table updated with however the Excel spreadsheet happens to get format or have it changed as it goes along allow writing to source this is an important one because with o le objects you had one-way communication where if you copied a text and you maintain a link copy to the spreadsheet maintain a link back to it through a Noli object any updates you made in Excel or your other program would then update and within the object in AutoCAD but that was one-way communication let's say you wanted to do all of your editing within AutoCAD that didn't work so with this allow writing to source file what it means is that we can then make changes within our table in AutoCAD and have those changes to the table pushed back to the source file and we'll see in a minute here how that works cell contents much like this formatting down here keep the data formats and formulas convert data formats text solve your formulas in Excel that's the default assumes that you have some formulas in the Excel spreadsheet that you want to key working there instead of in your table within AutoCAD over here we can link an entire sheet or we can link a named range now when we copied and pasted it special that copied a range of cells it made a link just to that named range and that's what this is down here now in Excel you can make a named range for a bunch of groups of cells and you can then any of those named ranges that you see in Excel will show up in this pulldown here and to see what that looks like we can cancel all this right now while we're thinking about it let's just say that we choose this grouping here and we call it a second block because it's the second block of things I don't think it liked the name I gave it and we'll just call this one howdy there all right so if we save the change here we'll go back to AutoCAD go back into data link we double click the same as right-clicking and modifying but now we could link to a named range now that I actually have a named range in the Excel spreadsheet if you had multiple of course they don't be here or I can link to a range of cells or I can link to the entire sheet which is what I'm going to do so let's just okay out of here and okay out of here now when you make a data link in this manner nothing actually happens in the drawing until you go to create a table so if you go up here to the annotate ribbon click table this brings in the from data link option that might covered earlier now that we have a data link we can choose it here say okay now we're going to insert this table it's going to take a second here because there are a lot of rows on this thing but eventually will pop up here with a there is so as you can see we have the entirety of that Excel spreadsheet and it's pretty lengthy so much like Mike did I'm going to break this thing up here now grab the brake option at the bottom here and if you move to the right you get more columns let's just do let's do 3 columns there we go a little bit more manageable that way now if you take a look and you go into any one of these cells and you right-click the thing by default it's going to be locked and you can't change the content and you find that if you hover over you see the little lock icon with the chain there indicating that the cell is data locked but it also shows the tooltip there as well but the content is locked but if we right-click a cell or group of cells for that matter we can choose to unlock them now if you hover over it should say that it's data unlocked so data linked cell unlocked it says not edited but we can double click on this now and we actually go in to an editing mode where we can make changes to it I should note that in order for this to work the source file should not be open in Excel so I've just closed Excel out here so let's let's just take out the I see now let's take out paving let's enter that now if we select this cell we can right click go to data links and you could also do the same thing there's there's options up here to do it through the ribbon but the right-click option is just as good so data link and go back here there we are we don't want to download changes from the source file okay we select the table let's go data link and for whatever reason our option to upload our changes to the source file are locked out here the grayed out typically that would be the option you'd want to go with and it will then let's make a save to our file here well it's going to not behave for me here for whatever reason but take it my word for it if you were to right-click this under normal conditions and which are not these right now we would unlock the data cells edit them here push the change back to the source excel file and it could be because I had the excel file opened when I started this whole thing so I I could close it out open it back up here and see if that gives me another option here to upload if it doesn't we'll move on now I'm still grayed out but that's the way it's supposed to work it's pretty slick that way because it enables you to make your changes within the table here or to do them in Excel whichever you choose now with all of the the table options you have here in AutoCAD now we should point out that by no means should you go abandon your your Excel program and don't use AutoCAD exclusively for your tables because frankly it's not a spreadsheet program this isn't just meant to give you some options to further annotate your drawings and that's why the interaction and the interoperability with tables and Excel is there but it's not meant to replace Excel so I've had a few instances where people are disappointed in autocad's table capabilities that they aren't quite up to up just enough with what Excel is and we never said that this was going to be a replacement for your spreadsheet software so please use it for what it is it's it's handy and it enables you to further annotate your drawings with table content but we don't want it to to take the place of your existing spreadsheet software so the only other thing that I wanted to cover real quick here and you might notice that the distances between your columns when you break them might not be what you want it's a real quick thing to do to change those things you can go into the properties of your table you can set manual positions for your breaks - yes what that will do for us it was enable enable us to go in real close here grab the grips in the corners and you can then bring the edges closer together shortening the gaps between your columns now it looks like they're overlapping there but when you deselect it you can see that they've still got a gap in between them there and we can do the same thing with this guy over here now begin by default these are going to be locked the the gaps but if you if you edit that property of your table it will then enable you to decrease the gaps between the breaks oh and I didn't duplicate my column headings I should take Mike's advice and go in and repeat my top labels here there we go of course you know as nothing happened and that is another thing that might covered here we'll show you this in action this first abbreviations cell here is a data designation so if we want to make it a header though then or a title for that matter because those are both labels let's just make it a header now it gets duplicated because now it is a label type of cell and not a data type of cell so now it will get reproduced at the top of every column as you go through there it's great that you went over that actually somebody was asking about how to do it AHA muscians well hopefully that helped it speaking of questions this is about the end of what I had prepared and at this point unlike usual we have some time so let's open it up for questions and let's go through anything anybody wants to cover here hopefully related to tables but we'll see what we get far as questions go I have a question from a lot of they're wondering how do you make a wood table no I'm sorry no not that no no not that one I just had to jeez you guys a little bit it's the model the build space downstairs yeah downstairs Hey so I'm praying a lot of people were wondering as like how do you how can you adjust the automatic reminder automatic column right here is it possible or not well let's take a look you can do it through a couple of ways when you select the table and you and you go to edit the thing you've got all these options up here you've got you can adjust the spacing between lines but for tables you can probably your best bet is to to do your table style let's take a look and see what we have here so largely your text height determines your row height so if we let's take a look and see if that works out let's go point to five on that let's change it for all let's change your header let's make our headers taller than our data let's go point three three let's go title going to be bigger than that let's let's do that and let's put the data back down down here there we go so the data is 0.25 the header is 0.33 the titles are also so let's say okay so that effectively does change things there let's take a look at the individual and it's now again this maybe I should start over with the table that isn't data linked because the the formatting here is going to largely be governed by what it came in as so let's let's just start a brand new table here that isn't now let's just go yeah five rows and five columns that's fine so nothing is controlled ahead of time here yeah I wasn't saying the option for it there you go there's our options for the whole table height and similarly if you if you go right or left with this top grip here you'll get your uniform column width to increase that yeah now this one is doing it just because I'm we had specified how many rows and columns we wanted true the only option I could find was to give them equally so if you right click under rows in the context menu right just a tad bit below mm-hmm you know you can say as rhosync oils equally I mean it will but make all the rows the same height though if they are not locked I see what you mean yeah so that was the only thing I could find in here yeah so it so it may not have like I think what they were probably looking for is the in-between grips here that you like you get with with Excel or other programs here well if you select one of the cells and the cell will actually give you the individual grips and now if you change the grip down there it'll it will change the size of them again yeah oh I see what you're saying there yeah so it's a little different in that the grips aren't at the top on the left but but it does look like it's available on a per cell or I imagine you could probably grab a selection of cells and have your grips act on those guys yeah so yeah you can do the same thing it's just a little bit different than it is in in other programs but but you certainly can adjust those those widths and Heights or you can do them all in you know as a whole by stretching the whole table together up or down look hopefully not easier one now maybe can you make a table annotated or not Jesus asking I'm going to say no on that and the reason I'm saying no is because there's no annotated option over here in the properties and for any other option object like dimensions or liters for example you have the options now what you could do and I've never tried it so it's something that's possible is you can include a table or any other object for that matter inside of a block definition and blocks can be annotated so in theory everything within a block would would scale up or down so that's a mystery making even more interesting is the option when you go into your table style if I type table style ride style when you're in your table style you have the option for your texts to use different text styles now you can choose an annotated text style for the text used in your table so your table itself isn't annotated but the content of your table cells the text would be annotated and as such would scale up and down as any other annotated object would I had to think that the that would affect the the cell width and the row Heights but and not having tested it I can't say for for certain for certain what what would happen there but certainly something to play around with absolutely he's act something somebody pointed out so when I was a you know kind of navigating through the cells using tab and enter if you press shift it'll go back so if you do shift a tab it'll oh yeah oh go to the left oh yeah the Scott mentioned it in the the questions was more of an answer but yeah yeah yeah I thought I have to be honest with them when you were going through it I thought that but I I figure you know shift-tab is you know it's pretty advanced I don't know but this is the basics this is a basic session here but no but yeah certainly shift-tab is a ism is definitely a good option if you're better if you just shift if you just run on things on the keyboard only questions naman what do we got oh well table be created in a paper space well yeah I mean that can be one-to-one so sure that was the annotated part of it I guess Damon suggesting oh I see yeah yeah they say certainly can you create a table anywhere just like any other object and but but the annotate of text within your table you know again eh not to get too much into annotated scaling but anything that's in paper space doesn't scale annotated ly as it does if it's in model space within a scaled viewport so that's something to consider there another question was is the data link only a data itself and not the formatting or can you bring some of the formatting in oh no you can absolutely bring the formatting yeah yeah you bet row Heights and column widths and all that that you know when we take a look back at the data link options let's get out of it all together there we go when we take a look at the let's just make a new one I don't know if I have any other tables to choose I guess we could just use the same one again but yeah the options here you can absolutely keep the the Excel formatting so that if if you later you know decide to subsequently go in and change the formatting within the source excel spreadsheet then the formatting of your table would then get updated and in and for that matter any any changes that you make within data linked excel spreadsheet you're going to get a pop up balloon down here in the bottom corner that indicates that just like when an xref changes or any other linked object changes you'll get a pop-up saying that your data linked excel spreadsheet just change would you like to update data link and it has a little hyperlink you can click on to to pull those changes in and make them effective I hope that hope that answers the mr. question oh yeah I think so I said is that let us know I'm enjoying her name French over there suck Howdy Doody yes so yeah can you show them merged cells because somebody's asking a can die do the last row as a kind of header or you know something like that sure so let's do that let's pick the let's pick all the cells the bottom row here merge and let's merge them all stall sure okay and then yeah you can now that this is one type you can change the row style to be header and if you put some header content in here if you then went and you selected the whole table and you split it out into a couple different columns you can then repeat the bottom labels sew the bottom labels just like top labels will repeat between your columns can also go to a table style and then switch it so your instead of reading it from the top from the top to the bottom you could read it from bottom to top oh yeah this the table direction exactly so if we went they want like headers at the bottom you could also go about it that way yep there we go there we just reverse the whole thing boy that's confusing it switch over the the option to duplicate top labels let's see ah still it still says no for top labels so yeah boy somebody sent you this drawing and you didn't know what they've done you can look at their table style you'd be looking at the properties thing and going what what is going on that's a that's a good point so it's good to know what that stuff does behind the screen so it looks like we're getting toward the top of the hour here so before we go I want to make sure that we finish out with where we are so in the in the slide deck we do have some links to additional resources as always we want to make sure that you know that all this is available and the YouTube page and the standard box locations and the links should be in your invites so we do want to do one last poll before we go and pick that here and we'll throw that out real quick is that while you're waiting for that do we have a link to the YouTube videos because I know somebody was asking if there was an easy way for them to access this in the future well yeah yeah absolutely um why I don't have it - let me see if I can find it again like a search one it should be right here no no I got it alright thank you so not a lot of votes tallied but we'll go ahead and close out the poll share the results here so majority say they learned something new today and read other 3% RJ days and they will never learn anything new from us I know I learned something new shifts tap shift enter oh yes good stuff so naman or Mike if you have it I'll throw it to you if you guys want to show the link there I already posted it in the oh did you okay I'm not great I'm not allowed by the questions there we go so it looks like we're at the top so as always we are certainly appreciate everybody's questions and we always appreciate your attendance and if there's anything else that you want to see there are feedback links in your invites so please let us know what you want to see from us in future webinars until then we will see you next time

Channel: AutoCAD

Views: 57,935

Keywords: autocad, autodesk, software, cad, tool, tutorial, how to, autocad tutorial, cad design, modeling tutorial, autocad 2d, drafting, auto cad, autodesk subscription, technical drawing, autocad tips and tricks, ADSK_Webinar, Build Your AutoCAD IQ!, Back to Basics, basics, tips, tricks, tips & tricks, tables, AutoCAD 2017, AutoCAD LT 2017, AutoCAD LT, spreadsheets, data

Id: bgd6EGniPWg

Length: 61min 5sec (3665 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 22 2016