• CAD Printouts from the computer-aided drafting program.Drawing accessories. image by mashe from Fotolia.com
  
  AutoCAD Civil 3D is a computer-aided drafting program that helps engineers create land development, transportation and environmental engineering projects in a quick and efficient way. Its effective use of Building Information Modeling (BIM) minimizes the time it takes to analyze, design and apply changes. You'll save a lot of time and get consistent results when you use styles to format your objects and labels.
  
  

Object Styles

• These styles allow you to control the design parameters and appearance of objects in your drawing. You can create custom object styles for specific applications and save them to a template for future use. Whenever you create an object in AutoCAD, the software applies a style to it. The styles it applies are standard object styles that come with the program, but they might not always meet your requirements. If they don't, you can copy an existing object style and edit its properties to create a new one. Regular objects have display, summary and information properties that you can alter. Alignment objects also have a design property that allows you to modify their grip-edit behavior (the grip-edit function is used to change an object's boundary).
  
  

Label Styles

• The way you apply and create label styles is the same as object styles, but label styles control the labeling and annotation properties of your objects. You can even save these styles to a template for reuse just like the object styles. Although the two styles are used in a similar way, label styles are more complex and have more variables. The three primary properties of label styles are the label component layout parameters, general label characteristics and dragged state settings. Every object type has a related label type for each of its component parts. AutoCAD's Label Style Composer allows you to create custom label styles for any object type.
  
  

Table Styles

• AutoCAD tables let you format drawing information so it's easy to read. All tables in AutoCAD can have table styles applied to them. The way these styles work is similar to the way object and label styles work. Use the Table Style Dialog Box to adjust the text and layout settings of your table. You can double-click the text in your table and column titles to select it for editing. Values in your individual cells can also be edited in the same way. To delete or add table columns, click on the corresponding buttons.