Chapter List

Overview

What we humans have worked for since the dawn of time has been a way to avoid work! (And oh, how hard we've worked to succeed at this most admirable goal!)

That's where things like tables and fields come in handy. Tables organize our world (nothing says lazy like pristine organizational skills, which of course, free up time to stare at the skyline or drift aimlessly in the pool); fields fill in those nicely organized blanks for us.

This fourth section of our text will cover some razzledazzle tools. These are the tools that pushed CAD systems ahead of the drawing board as the preferred tool in design work. We'll begin with some new text tools in this lesson; then, in subsequent lessons, we'll learn to create hatching, blocks of objects, and blocks of information.

So, stop yawning, and let s begin.

17.1 Tables

It's amazing just how much work can be avoided by the innovative use of rows and columns (just consider how the appendices at the end of this text help you avoid wasting time trying to find solutions to some basic CAD problems)! Of course, the collective name for rows and columns is table. Tables have saved time and effort in virtually every industry on earth (just ask any accountant).

AutoCAD makes tables available for legends,...