By Dennis Collin
AutoCAD has had Excel like capabilities for some time now in that it can create tabular objects and do formulas like SUM and COUNT etc.
However, something I was slow to realise is that it can also autofill incremental values in tables. This is useful for perhaps filling in dates for revisions, survey point numbers or serial or part numbers for lists. To count individual numbers is a straightforward process, just click in the desired starting cell and locate the cyan handle to stretch and define the Autofill area.
Very handy for door schedules and point numbers! But what about counting in increments like 10 or counting the first day of say a month, when listing dates? Well, if you know MS Excel well you can select multiple cells simultaneously and get Excel to follow the defined sequence. In AutoCAD it is the same process, select multiple cells in the table by using the SHIFT button, this will 'teach' AutoCAD what to repeat and then drag the cyan autofill icon to the area of the table you wish to populate.
This will result in the image above. Unfortunately, this only seems to work with numerical data, but I suppose for more complex operations create your spreadsheet in MS Excel and import or link the table into AutoCAD directly should you wish to count in letters of hexadecimal.
I will show the importing of Excel into AutoCAD process in a future post.