Content: Editing block attributes

- [Instructor] Welcome to another AutoCAD tip and trick for today. What we're going to have a look at is editing block attributes. We've got a nice simple drawing for you, it's called EditingBlockAttributes.dwg, surprise, surprise. And you can download that from the library to follow along with the video. So, you'll notice in the drawing we've got a metric hinge, a metric bolt, and a metric keyhole. And each of these is a block with attributes. So, if I hover there you can see the hinge is a block, the bolt is also a block, and the keyhole is also a block.

Now, if I want to edit the attributes of any of these blocks, what I could do, for example, is go to the Insert tab on the ribbon, go to the block editor, and let's say I select the metric hinge. I click on OK, and as you can see, there's my blockname attribute there. I can go in there, I can edit that if I want to. I can select it, I could delete it. I could add more attributes, and then I could close the block editor and save all of those settings back to the block and they will update accordingly in the AutoCAD drawing.

It does seem quite a long-winded way of doing things, doesn't it? Now, let's have a look at a much quicker way. If I just double-click on this block, you get this lovely little tool called the Enhanced Attribute Editor. I'm just going to cancel it a moment, and I'm going to pan across to the right. I'm then going to double-click on my metric hinge again. There we go. And there's my Enhanced Attribute Editor. This is a lovely little simple tool in AutoCAD that allows you to edit your block attributes very quickly and very easily.

So, at the moment, you can see there's my attribute, BLOCKNAME. There's the prompt, Block name, and the value is Metric Hinge. So, let's say that we've suddenly realized that this is not a metric hinge, it's an imperial hinge. So, I'll just type in Imperial Hinge, like so. It updates on the screen as you can see, and more importantly, I can change the text options, so I can change the height of it. Let's change that to, say, 15. And let's change the properties as well. Let's give it a different color. Let's say we wanted red.

I apply that, I OK it, and everything updates accordingly. So, let's work on the other blocks as well. Let's double-click on Metric Bolt. Again, notice I could even select different blocks if I want to by clicking there in the Enhanced Attribute Editor. I don't actually have to close it. So, in this case, as you can see, I want to change that to an Imperial Bolt, perhaps. And as you can see, it's kept the same color and so on. Let's go to text options, let's change that to 15 as well. Let's change the properties to red as well, the color goes red.

And you can see everything is now consistent. So, I'll apply that and then I just go Select Block. This time, I'm just going to click on the keyhole. As you can see, Enhanced Attribute Editor kicks in again. So, I go to the attribute. This time, it's got an invisible attribute as well, which is, you'll notice, the keyhole type, which is regular. We'll leave that as it is. The block name though, we need to change to Imperial Keyhole. So we'll change that, you can see it updates. Make sure you get that capital letter, which I missed.

There we go, like so. So, I've got that in place, I'll go to Text Options. I want the height of that to be 15 as well, to be consistent. Properties, I want the color to be red again, to be consistent. I'll apply that, I'll OK it this time to close it out, and you can see how quick and easy it is to edit those block attributes once they're in your AutoCAD drawings.