Getting Started With Civil 3D Reports

Civil 3D has some great productivity tool built into it; many of which I think are overlooked quite often. Although it isn't always necessary to produce a document or spreadsheet for every little design task on a project, Civil 3D has an easy-to-use and effective reporting tool built into it for when the need arises. If you haven't attempted to execute or export a report within Civil 3D before, this would be a great first attempt at doing so.

One of the many reporting functions in Civil 3D is generating a general legal description or Surveyor's certificate from Parcels. Of course the report can only be as accurate as the geometry it is created from, but it is a fairly powerful tool that could be the verbiage basis for a plat or other submittable document. (Please note that all reports produced by Civil 3D should be reviewed and/or corrected to meet standards and regulations)

To create the report, go to the Toolbox tab on the Civil 3D Toolspace. For this particular report, navigate to the Parcel category, right-click "Surveyors_Certificate", and select "Execute" (alternatively, just double-click the report to execute it).

Within the Export to XML Report dialog, make sure that the parcel or parcels you want to generate a description are selected. Note that Civil 3D will parse any object type that isn't relevant to the type of report being generated, so you don't have to check or un-check every option within this dialog, just the objects pertinent to the type of report as shown below.

Once you have the items selected as needed, select "OK" and you will be directed to a Save-As dialog to define the file name and location for the report to be saved to.

After saving the file, it will then open up your default internet browser (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, or in my case, Chrome). You'll see the report in HTML format which is essentially a web page. You can review this document for correctness, but it is difficult to edit HTML documents unless you are familiar with basic web programming.

If you are educated in HTML programming and formatting, feel free to open the report in Notepad or something of the sort and customize the document to meet your needs. However, what I often offer as an easier - and more universally understood - option, is to open the file in Microsoft Word. Simply navigate to the file on your hard drive or network, right-click, go to "Open with", and choose the "Microsoft Office Word" option from the short-cut menu.

This opens the HTML file in Word and allows you to edit all the contents just like any other rich text format file. As you can see below, there are no discernible differences between the HTML file and a regular Word .doc file.

When you are done editing the file, simply save it to keep it as an HTML file, or perform a save-as and convert the HTML file to any other format Word can output to (.doc, .docx, .wps, .txt, etc.). This will allow for easy archiving and editing in the future. It is also a format that a far greater number of people will recognize and know how to use.

I hope these simple tips will motivate you to utilize the Civil 3D reporting tools a little more often, or at least get started with them. If you have any suggestions for future blog post topics, please submit them in the comments below and we'll try to address them as allowable.

Comments

[John Spell]

I started digging through this report file, but how do i control the language used for curves, or the precision of the line dimensions? Is all of this based off of the Line/Curve label style that was chosen for the parcel segment?

[Bryan Tanner]

As mentioned on our twitter conversation, using the report editing tool (toolbox symbol on the top left corner of the Toolspace Toolbox tab) you can edit the language and format of the reports you create.

[Civil Engineer Mountain View]

Good article keep it thanks you are sharing a good post thanks again.