Field Link with Multiple Drawings

[nick.moore]

Does anyone know of a simple way to link text fields across multiple drawings? To be more clear, my situation is this:

I have several drawings that have lots of Manholes (plans, one-lines, schedules) and I would really like a way to link a field so that these Manhole Numbers get updated in one location only to avoid errors. I am open to any and all suggestions for how to make this happen. I am not very wise in the ways of using fields as our company has not exactly been on the cutting edge of using the tools that Autocad provides.

Any help is greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

[Tom Beauford]

Assuming these are all for one project putting them all in a sheet set may be a good place to start. Sheet sets can have fields which are available to each drawing in the sheet set.

[cadtag]

Welcome to Augi

If you've got a lot of manholes, sheetset fields will be awfully cumbersome. But however you decide to do it, the data is going to have to be maintained someplace other than 1 drawing - as all the drawings that reference that manhole will have to be able to get to the location and update the field whenever the drawing opens.

Seems that maintaining the manhole numbers in an Excel spreadsheet and creating DATALINKs would be one route, and you could use a 1 cell table to hold the field that contained the manhole number.

That's still not a good solution, and would not be very robust IMHO. Realistically you either need to go with a vertical (Civil3d, even Map3d), third party software (Possibly Mapworks from dotSoft), or develop a custom application to make the connection between the external datasource of manholes and the drawings.