Using Project Explorer for Reports and Tables

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RUSS NICLOY: Hello, and welcome to customer reports and Project

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Explorer.

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My name is Russ Nicloy, Civil solutions specialist

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at Macer Technologies.

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In this course, we are looking at Project Explorer for Civil

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in your design file.

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This session is part one of

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reports.

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Currently, we are looking at how to create custom reports

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and tables in Project Explorer.

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In this learning path, we are starting out

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by looking at when you should decide

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to use Project Explorer for creating reports or tables.

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First, we will look at the benefits

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the record formatting and Project Explorer.

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Next, the benefits for Civil 3D table

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formats, and finally, the benefits

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for AutoCAD table formats.

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Project Explorer offers more formatting and style options

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than the Civil 3D reports do.

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Generally, if I go in and take a look at the reports from Civil

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just which ones we're going to run.

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You end up with a report that looks like this.

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Now, you could change things like the header information

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or the amount of precision to these--

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the column data.

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That's all in the settings for the reports here.

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But you would have to go to edit the toolbox content here

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to get into where the format for this report is stored.

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And like I said, you would have to know some coding

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to get that accomplished.

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And basically, a report that looks like this from Civil 3D

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reports could look something like this, or something

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like this, depending on the information that you wanted

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to show and the standardized format

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that you're trying to accomplish.

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Now, in regards to Civil 3D tables,

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the differences may be small, but there

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are some that could be important to customers or end-users.

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I'm going to go and take a look at the Civil 3D curve table

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tool.

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And I have a style created here for the type of report

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that I want to create.

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And I'll drop that report in here.

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I'll put it next to one from Project Explorer.

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Now, if things like the first column,

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I can't get rid of the first column here,

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and I can't put the name of the alignment

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in the header for that table.

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Small things, things that you might

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be able to get around or explain away.

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But in this format, the Civil

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you can accomplish that.

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Also, things like the distance in this table

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is not the same distance that we need for the information

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in this table.

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Now, it's true that you can create expressions,

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and you could come up with the correct distance.

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But that's after you've created the expression and used that.

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These tables are much easier to create that for

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and are much more direct about it.

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And finally, there is the AutoCAD table.

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Inside the annotate tab tables, if I go to table,

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basically there isn't a lot of Civil 3D object to access here.

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We get a lot of looking at this is what the data

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table is going to look like.

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They're empty data cells that we have to fill in.

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Now, we could use insert fields to insert data in here.

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But it's going to be much more linked up

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to the AutoCAD objects rather than the Civil 3D objects.

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It is true, of course, that you could use a spreadsheet.

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I'm copying information from that spreadsheet,

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and then I'm going to paste it into this file.

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It's nice that I can post a link from a spreadsheet

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into this file.

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But this is really just a linked image back to that spreadsheet.

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Changes to the spreadsheet will update here.

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But that means that I have to maintain two different files.

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One of them outside of Civil 3D.

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And the data about the Project is not dynamic into this table.

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It's all done in the spreadsheet.

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In the Project Explorer spreadsheet,

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this data can all be dynamic if I choose it to be.

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And it can be done all within the Civil 3D file

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that I'm using the table in.