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Thursday, December 27, 2012

Splitting Tables in Autodesk Inventor

“Let the gentle bush dig its root deep and spread upward to split the boulder.”
Carl Sandburg


As I'm waiting for 2013 to arrive, I came across a little tip in Autodesk Inventor that it could be said falls into the "I never noticed that" section. 

Splitting a hole table.

Once upon a time, when I was designing stamping dies, there were many a time that the hole table describing all the holes in a die plate would run off the page. 

Back at that time, I was using AutoCAD, so breaking was a matter of inserting and manually populating blocks.  

But what happens if the same thing needs to be done with Inventor?  Below is an example of a hole table I want to split.  I know the table isn't that long, and probably doesn't need to be split in this case, but bear with me, it's just an example!  Besides, I didn't feel like modeling a part that did run off the page!


A table in need of splitting

Let's say I want to split the table at the row 'C1'.  All I have to do is right click inside one of the fields, and choose "Table>Split Table".





Splitting the table.  Make sure to click inside one of the fields
After choosing the "Split Table" option, the table will split at that cell.  Click and drag on the tables to reposition them.  The hole table can then be split again, and again, as needed!

Repositioning the newly split table.

That's all there is to it!  But there's a couple of other tips worth knowing. 

1) If the table needs to be "recombined", right click on the table, and choose Table>Un-Split Table

Combining a "un-splitting" a split table.

 
2) This is very important!  Don't click on the border of the cell! The "Split Table" option will gray out if the border of the cell is clicked on!



This is what happens when clicking on the border of a cell!
So that is today's short little tip.  A few tricks that I hope are helpful. 

Have a few thoughts you want to share?  Feel free to drop a comment or two!

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