Sorry for the delay on getting this post out. Between an extremely hectic week followed by some much needed vacation time, I didn’t have the opportunity to post this lesson. Because of this, there will be two posts covering AutoCAD Fields this week.

With this lesson on AutoCAD Fields, we’re going to focus on the power of Fields used in conjunction with blocks and viewports to display their properties.  I’ll cover some of the basics and allow you to expand on those concepts yourself.  The potential for Fields with your drawing objects nearly unthinkable-limited only by your imagination.

Everyone uses paper space in to create their sheets now (and if you don’t, start) and the key to using paper space sheets is viewports.  Using Fields with viewports is easy, and there is a lot of flexibility in what you can do with them.  In the image below, you will see where I’m labeling a title for a detail and proceeding to the point where I need to enter the viewport scale.

At this point, right-click and pick “Insert Field” from the short cut menu.  As instructed in earlier lessons, this will bring you into the Field dialog box.

Once there filter to the “Objects” Category and select “Object” from the Field name area of the dialog box.  Then pick the button to the right of the “Object type” area of the dialog box. This is the Select object button that will allow you to choose what object in your drawing you are associating the Field to.  You can follow these steps depicted in the image below.

The dialog box will temporarily close allowing you to select the viewport.  Do this and hit “Enter” in order to return to the dialog box.  After reentering the dialog, you can move forward with choosing your options for the Field.  The Property and Format areas of the Field dialog box are dynamic in that they will display options that are specific to the type of object you are associating the Field to.  Follow the selections as I have in the image below in order to create a Field for the viewport scale and then select “OK”.

You can now see the Field created in your text entity displaying the current scale of your viewport.

In the following image, you can see that I am in the viewport and have changed the scale to twice what it previously was.  You may also notice that the Field still displays the original scale.

The scale in the Field has not changed because the drawing hasn’t been updated to the changes you’ve just made.  If you simply regenerate your drawing (RE or REA), you will see the Field update as shown below.

This is an easy exercise for testing the abilities of AutoCAD Fields.  You can probably tell how beneficial this is by automating the process for you.  One additional benefit to annotating your scales in this way is error checking.  If someone forgot to lock the viewport and changed the scale a small increment that isn’t noticed easily, the Field will update and tell you something is off.  So this is a great step toward to “error-proofing” your drawings in addition to quicker drafting.