Well, another week in a hotel for me. I’m at home sweet Hampton Inn this week, teaching a Civil 3D Essentials class. I’ll go home Friday night, then fly out at 6 AM on Sunday morning for San Francisco to attend the Autodesk Geospatial Summit next Monday. My dogs have forgotten who I am….

This week, I’m teaching at CDG Engineers and Associates in Albertville, Alabama. I linked to them because I promised Audra that I would since she encouraged me to figure out the answer to her question 😉 Her question was regarding Tag Labels. We all remember tag labels in Land Desktop, right? They were OK, but annoying, and if you ever deleted a line without deleting the labels, it took an act of congress to get back to that original number (renumbering wasn’t that easy back then). Here’s a quick and dirty “how to” regarding changing tag numbers on a line.

First, you have to have a style that displays a tag. You do this by going to the General tab of your Label Style Composer, and setting your display mode to Tag, as shown below:

Now, I’ve got a parcel (small, isn’t it?) Since it’s so small, I’d really like to label the lines with tags instead of bearings and distances. To do this, I go to Parcels and select Add Labels. I pick Parcel as the type of label that I’m inserting, and select Multiple Segments, then make sure that my Tag Label style is set as current. Then, I select the parcel (selecting the parcel label is the best way to do this) and all my segments are labeled. To show the data in a table, I go to Parcels, select Table, and add a Line Table. I now have the following results:

Now, let’s see what happens when we delete the label on the south line (the line running E/W) – it appears to delete it, all right, and updates the line table as well…

OK, good enough. That’s what I expected it to do. However, let’s assume for a minute that I want that label back, and I want it to be L3 again. Let’s just add another tag label…wait, that’s not the right label! That puts L5 on the line!

That’s all wrong…we want that one to be L3, not L5, right? So what can we do, other than renumber the label. Yes, it’s just that simple – we go to Parcels, select Tables, then select Renumber Tags:

Now, that brings up the Renumber Tag Label dialog box. Since we want ours to start at 3, we type the number “3” in the Starting Number box:

The program asks us what we want to re-label – a line or curve. We select Line, since that’s what our parcel is comprised of.

Next, we select the label(s) that we want to renumber, and it updates to L3, just as we wanted it to. More importantly, it changes the table, and moves L3 above L4, just as it should be (rather than below, as it was when it was L5.)

And that, my friends, is how to renumber Tag Labels in Civil 3D. You can perform this the same way with Curves and Spirals, by the way. A lot easier than it was in Land Desktop, no?

Have Fun!