PowerCADD Forum

Trying to finish up a project and went to create door& window schedules. I tried using the advanced text tool as described in the manual but without success. I can not click & drag to create a text block other than a single line. The Advanced Paragraph Text Edit Window does not appear either.

It would be much easier than creating tables in another program and placing them.

Anyone else have a way to correct this or work around? Yes, I've restarted, latest versions of PC & WT installed and offerings made.

Best, Bill

I'm a long time PC user and had never used tables, until this past Friday. I didn't use the manual, but was able to create a Window Schedule by fumbling around:

I selected the Advanced Text tool and "dragged" a text box, then typed in some dummy text. I then hit "command E" to open the edit window. At the top of the window is a tool bar containing an image of a table. I clicked on that table image and, voila, a table appeared in the text box. I could then edit the number of rows and columns (in the separate Table window that opens up when using the Edit window), add borders, etc. I am more familiar with using tables in Pages or spreadsheets, but this was adequate for my purposes. I was surprised that I could fumble my way through it easily.

Let us know if this doesn't work for you. Good luck!

Thank you for the quick response Patrick. It worked!!!

Long time user here as well. I should have known better than to use the manual. What's left of my memory says that there was an actual Table Tool at one time.

Thank you again for the help.

Phew!

Thanks Patrick, I didn't know about that in PowerCADD and it's very helpful.

I usually just do tables in Numbers - then literally copy and paste them into PowerCadd, and they come in as a placed PDF.

lava wrote: ↑

Wed Jun 23, 2021 3:43 am

I usually just do tables in Numbers - then literally copy and paste them into PowerCadd, and they come in as a placed PDF.

Funny, I had never thought of doing that. I normally do the opposite, like copy my architectural stamp from PC and paste it into Pages documents. Thanks for the tip!

(I just fiddled with it a bit, and it works great, allowing better formatting than the PC table feature.)

patrickm wrote: ↑

Wed Jun 23, 2021 2:11 pm

(I just fiddled with it a bit, and it works great, allowing better formatting than the PC table feature.)

Yes - any formatting you do in Numbers comes in. Its like you've printed a PDF and placed it, except you just copy and paste and bypass the printing - select the entire table, or just the cells you want - copy, click into PowerCadd and paste. You've now got a placed PDF with control handles at the corners, you can scale it to fit where you need to put it by grabbing the corner.

No knocks against the PowerCadd table tool - but I find I'm faster and more flexible in Numbers.

This is pretty funny. Apple has something called a textView. It’s a rectangular area that displays some text. Except for Adobe and Microsoft software, every visible text is a textView. They can be edited or not.

An Advanced Text object in PowerCADD and a page in Pages are exactly the same thing and in these cases creating and editing a table are both enabled, while they are not in this textView in the PowerCADD forum. And it’s simple to copy text from one textView to another.

The ‘old text’ in PowerCADD was all done in PowerCADD and it was unbelievably difficult, creating a number of incidents of programmer burnout, near nervous breakdowns, etc. Text in PowerCADD is more complicated than all of PowerCADD and WildTools combined, thank heaven it’s all done by Apple in California!

Alfred

Alfred you got me thinking (V dangerous). After reading your post I tried to copy & paste a table created in Numbers and using the Advanced Text tool to paste it. It took a bit of time but placed the table in editable form on my open drawing. I had been trying a direct cut and paste and pasting within the Text Tool without success.

This is exactly what I was looking for and hope it works for everyone else.