In the May Preview, I listed the AutoCAD Help Menu’s definition of what a Field is. Something a little more descriptive, and yet easier to understand, would be that a Field is a vehicle to link object, drawing, sheet set, and environmental data into text that can be read, understood, and updated dynamically with your drawing data. Well, at least I think that is a little more descriptive and easier to understand than the Help menu.

Fields can be inserted into any kind of text such as attributes, attribute definitions, table cells, and plain text. The only type of text a Field can’t be utilized within is a tolerance. You can insert Fields into any of these forms of text by simply right-clicking and picking “Insert Field” from the short-cut menu as shown below.

Your first time in the Field dialog box can be a little overwhelming. There are Field categories and Field names. Once you narrow down a category to the type of Field data that you want to insert and the name of the Field you plan to use, you are then presented with many more boxes within the dialog box such as formats, examples, hints, previews, formulas, and much more depending on what Field you choose.  Although this is a little intimidating to the uninitiated, there are very easy and basic Fields to start out with and experiment with.

Possibly the best to start out with is the Field for “Date”. This can be found within the “Date & Time” Field category along with “CreateDate”, “PlotDate”, and “SaveDate” or you can simply pick from the “All” category.  You’ll see below, the Field dialog box as it looks when you have chosen the “Date” Field type.  You can choose the style you’d like to use from the “Examples” area and it will display the format at the top.  If you don’t see the exact style that you want to use from the “Examples” box, you can manually enter it in the “Date format” box using the syntax shown within the “Hints” box.  Also, for those of you more familiar with Diesel Expressions, you can see the “Field expression” box at the bottom of the dialog.

Once you’re happy with the options you’ve selected, pick “OK” and you will see the Field populate in the text box as seen below.

You’ll likely notice the gray background surrounding the Field.  AutoCAD defaults with this Gray background for all Fields in order to depict that what you are seeing isn’t “ordinary” text. I don’t mind the gray background, and actually find it helpful to those who aren’t experienced with Fields to see what all can be utilized with them.  However, if you don’t like the background or find in annoying…whatever the reason, you can hide it by entering the System Variable FIELDDISPLAY and changing it to “0.”

There is another somewhat important System Variable tied to Fields, which is FIELDEVAL. This system variable controls when and what events cause the Fields in your drawing to update. The controls are as follow:  0 = Not updated, 1 = Updated on Open, 2 = Updated on Save, 4 = Updated on Plot, 8 = Updated on use of ETRANSMIT, 16 = Updated on Regeneration.  I like to have mine set at 16 for updating the Field data upon Regeneration of the drawing simply as a matter of instant gratification.  It would likely be best to have your Fields update at least upon Plotting since you would want the most updated information on anything that goes out the door of your office.

That’s it for today’s post on Fields.  In the next post we will explore the implementation of Fields within Title Blocks and their use in conjunction with the Sheet Set Manager.