If you organize your Civil 3D projects into sheet sets, you’re probably familiar with the concept of Fields. Fields represent “smart” text objects that populate automatically when they’re added to a sheet set. On occasion, individual fields may present a challenge when linked to an empty (or unknown) value. That’s because fields have an inherent need to show SOMETHING. In today’s installment, we’ll learn a trick for displaying empty fields.

The trick involves using a pair of “%” symbols. Back in the day, these symbols were used to incorporate special characters into text objects. (%%C for example, placed a diameter symbol.) By simply “pulling up short” and eliminating the character after the %% will cause a field to have an empty display. Using this technique, you can create nice clean fields that only display data when you want them to.

If you're interested, I’ve created a quick video that walks through the workflow…

-Jeff

Note: In my example I am working in Civil 3D. This trick also works in ANY other AutoCAD based application.