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Modifying Mtext

After you create a multiline text object, you can edit it in the same ways as a single-line text object: Select the object, right-click, and choose Mtext Edit or Properties.

Mtext Edit: Selecting this option opens the In-Place Text Editor window so that you can change the text contents and formatting.

Properties: Selecting this option opens the Properties palette, where you can change overall properties for the text object.

Quick Properties: Enable this setting on the status bar to make simply selecting a multiline text object open the Quick Properties palette, in which you can modify a subset of the Mtext object’s properties.

The easiest way to change the word-wrapping width of a paragraph text object is to grip edit it. Select the text object, click one of the corner grips, release the mouse button, move the crosshairs, and click again. Chapter 10 describes grip editing in detail.

Just like any good word processor or text editor, AutoCAD includes both spell checker and a find-and-replace tool for text or dimensions. To check the spelling of selected objects or the entire drawing, click the Annotate tab on the Ribbon and choose Check Spelling from the Text panel to display the Check Spelling dialog box. On the same panel, clicking Find Text, or typing FIND and pressing Enter, displays the Find and Replace dialog box. Handily, Find and Replace and Spell Check are both also accessible from the Text Editor tab’s Spell Check and Tools panels — in case you just want to replace text or check spelling within a single multiline text object. Look up SPELL or FIND in the online help if you need more information on either command.

Gather Round the Tables

You don’t know the meaning of the word tedious unless you’ve tried to create a column-and-row data table in older versions of AutoCAD by using the LINE and TEXT commands. AutoCAD’s table object and the TABLESTYLE and TABLE commands for creating it make the job almost fun.

Table objects in AutoCAD 2013 are not annotative, so you have just two methods of adding them to drawings: You can create them in model space, scaling them up by the drawing scale factor (see Chapter 4 for a refresher), or — and this seems more sensible to us — you can create them in a layout, in paper space, defining them by their actual plotted (paper) dimensions.

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Tables have style, too

You control the appearance of tables — both the text and the gridlines — with table styles (just as you control the appearance of stand-alone text with text styles). Use the TABLESTYLE command to create and modify table styles. Follow these steps to create a table:

1.On the Home tab, click the Annotation panel’s label to open its slideout and then choose Table Style.

The Table Style dialog box appears.

2.In the Styles list, select the existing table style whose settings you want to use as the starting point for the settings of your new style.

For example, select the default table style named Standard.

3.Click the New button to create a new table style that’s a copy of the existing style.

The Create New Table Style dialog box appears.

4.Enter a New Style Name and click Continue.

The New Table Style dialog box appears, as shown in Figure 13-8.

Figure 13-8: Setting the table.

5.In the Cell Styles area, with Data showing in the list box, specify settings for the data alignment, margins, text, and borders.

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290 Part III: If Drawings Could Talk

The settings you’re likely to want to change are Text Style, Text Height, and perhaps either Text Color (all three are on the Text tab) or Grid Color (on the Borders tab). If you leave colors set to ByBlock, the text and grid lines will inherit the color that’s current when you create the table. That color will be the current layer’s color, if you follow my advice in Chapter 6.

6.In the Cell Styles area, open the drop-down list and repeat Step 5 for the Headers (that is, the column headings) and the Title.

7.Click OK to close the New Table Style dialog box.

The Table Style dialog box reappears.

8.Click Close.

Your new table style becomes the current table style that AutoCAD uses for future tables in this drawing, and the Table Style dialog box closes. Now you’re ready to create a table, as described in the next section.

You can access the Manage Cell Styles dialog box directly from the Cell Styles drop-down list of the New Table Style dialog box. The Table Cell Format (on the General tab, Format row, click the ellipsis button) dialog box provides a number of additional options for formatting cells by data type.

AutoCAD stores table styles in the DWG file, so a style that you create in one drawing isn’t immediately available in others. You can copy a table style from one drawing to another with DesignCenter. (Use the procedure for copying layers between drawings outlined in Chapter 6, but substitute Tablestyles for Layers.) Table styles can also be defined in your template files (see Chapter 4).

Creating and editing tables

After you create a suitable table style, adding a table to your drawing is easy with the TABLE command. Here’s how:

1.Set an appropriate layer current.

Assuming that you leave the current color, linetype, and lineweight set to ByLayer, as we recommend in Chapter 6, the current layer’s properties will control the properties of any parts of the table that you left set to ByBlock when you defined the table style. (See Step 5 in the preceding section, “Tables have style, too.”)

2.On the Home tab’s Annotation panel, choose Table.

The Insert Table dialog box appears.

3.Choose a table style from the Table Style drop-down list.

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4.Choose an Insertion Behavior:

•Specify Insertion Point: The easiest method. You pick the location of the table’s upper-left corner (or lower-left corner if you set Table Direction to Up in the table style). When you use this method, you specify the default column width and number of rows in the Insert Table dialog box.

•Specify Window: You pick the upper-left corner and then the lowerright corner. When you use this method, AutoCAD automatically scales the column widths and determines how many rows to include.

5.Specify Column & Row Settings.

If you chose Specify Window in Step 4, AutoCAD sets the Column Width and number of Data Rows to Auto, which means that AutoCAD will figure them out, basing those values on the overall size of the table that you specify in Steps 7 and 8.

6.Click OK.

AutoCAD prompts you to specify the insertion point of the table.

7.Click a point or type coordinates.

If you chose Specify Insertion Point in Step 4, AutoCAD draws the table grid lines, places the cursor in the title cell, and displays the Text Editor tab on the Ribbon.

8.If you chose Specify Window in Step 4, specify the diagonally opposite corner of the table.

AutoCAD draws the table based on the table size you indicated and chooses the column width and number of rows.

9.Type a title for the table.

10.Type values in each cell, using the arrow keys or Tab key to move among cells.

The cell right-click menu offers many other options, including copying contents from one cell to another, merging cells, inserting rows and columns, changing formatting, and inserting a block (that is, a graphical symbol — see Chapter 17 for information about blocks).

The fields feature described earlier in this chapter works for table text, too — you can insert a field into a table cell. For example, you might use this feature to create part of a title block, with fields serving as the “date” and “drawn by” data.

You can also insert blocks into table cells. We cover blocks in Chapter 17.

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11.Click Close Text Editor on the Ribbon (or click OK on the Text Formatting toolbar).

Figure 13-9 shows a completed table, along with the Insert Table dialog box.

Figure 13-9: The Insert Table dialog box and one result of using it.

You can edit cell values later, simply by double-clicking in a cell. To change column width or row height, click the table grid and then click and move the blue grips. (To change the width of one column without altering the overall width of the table, hold down the Ctrl key while you move the grip.) If you want to change other aspects of a table or individual cells in it, select the table or cell and use the Quick Properties palette or the Properties palette to make changes.

The DATAEXTRACTION and DATALINK commands are very powerful tools in AutoCAD. Between them they can be used to link all or part of an Excel spreadsheet into a table in a drawing, or interrogate a drawing and produce a great variety of information from it such as sizes, areas, perimeters, and quantities of drawing objects and then create a linked table of the data, or write the data out to an Excel spreadsheet, or all three options at once. A detailed description of these functionalities is beyond the scope of this book, but there are several online references available that cover them. Here are two that can get you started:

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