Overview

It s impossible to imagine AutoCAD without blocks. They ve become as fundamental as drawing lines and circles. When external references were introduced, they were like super blocks that could span multiple drawings, and before long most of us found them nearly as essential as blocks. Now that tables have become internal spreadsheets, and fields can be used to place adaptable text, the process of annotating designs is more efficient than ever. These indispensable annotation tools are now commonplace, but there are times when they can still be baffling.

In this chapter, I ll address the fundamentals of blocks, the appropriate use of the WBLOCK command, and the management of external references. I ll make suggestions for managing symbol libraries, provide an overview of the process of attaching attributes to blocks, and demonstrate how to extract data from blocks in a drawing using two different approaches.

• Blocks

• Editing Blocks

• Managing Symbol Libraries

• Adding and Extracting Attributes

• External References

• Tables and Fields

Blocks

If you ever did any board drafting before the advent of computer aided design, you undoubtedly used a number of green plastic templates containing cutouts of standard symbols used in your discipline. Templates made drafting more efficient and more uniform. Blocks are often compared with those handy templates, and in some ways that comparison is apt but not entirely. Blocks and the other annotation tools in AutoCAD have far more value than those green templates ever did. Using a computer for design is more about creating...