Creating a Finished Materials Schedule in AutoCAD Using Tables for Residential Interior Design Projects

Now let's create our finished schedule. To begin, we need to open up our AutoCAD for Interior Design Residential Sheet Notes document and then scroll down to page 8. Here on page 8, we can see all the verbiage we need for our finished schedule. What is the finished schedule? It essentially tells the contractor and owner all of the materials that go into each room in our project.

Over in AutoCAD, there isn't really a schedule tool per se, but there is a table tool that functions perfectly for creating schedules. There are two ways to access this tool. One is in our toolbar.

We're looking for a button that says table or we can type it in. We can type in the word table and click enter. This opens up an insert table window and we can specify a few settings.

The two settings we want to change are the columns. We want to set that to 5 and the data rows, we want to set that to 13. We can leave everything else as a default for now and go ahead and click OK.

We'll notice at our cursor point, we now have a schedule or a table and we want to put that more or less kind of in the upper left hand corner. We'll click one time and there it is. Our first step is to give it a title, which is finished schedule.

We'll type that in and now we can start to populate the data. I'm going to zoom in a little bit to make it easier to see. In fact, I'm going to do Z for zoom and then I'm going to select a window and draw a window right around my schedule.

Zoom in nice and tight. There it is. Now if I hover my cursor over that schedule, I'll notice I get rows and columns just like a spreadsheet.

A1, A2, and so it works a lot like a spreadsheet. All I need to do now is copy paste from my guide here over into my table. We'll start with the header.

These are the column headings. We'll do CTRL C on our keyboard and then go over to our first row here. It's really row two, but our first split up row here.

We'll paste room and then we have our floor finish. We'll copy that, CTRL C. It's important to highlight the text. We don't want to bring in any extra spaces or returns at the end because it does bring them over.

We'll go to wall finish and we'll do CTRL C. We'll double click in that cell and we'll do wall finish, then ceiling finish, CTRL C, CTRL V to paste, and then baseboard, CTRL C, and CTRL V. There it is. We have all of our column headings. Now we'll add in one row of data together.

We'll do CTRL C here on living room. I don't want to select that whole cell here. I want finished original hardwood.

We'll double click and paste it here. Then our wall finish, paint white dove. We'll copy that, paste, and you get the idea.

We're just copying and pasting all this information in. If you prefer not to copy paste, you can retype the data. It's another way to go.

The baseboards, we'll get the original wood painted white. There we go. We now have one row of data.

A couple things we can do. If we are typing them out, we can hit the enter key and it takes us to the next row down. It's kind of a faster way to move through this table.

Typing them in honestly is a great way to go, especially for some of these shorter data points like the room name. They're pretty quick. So hall and then we can go first floor, and then we can do dining room.

Pretty quick to just type them in. Powder room, pantry, and I'm just hitting enter on my keyboard to go from row to row. Closet, second floor, hall, second floor, main bedroom, walk-in closet, bathroom, and that's it.

I might have created one extra row of data, but that's not a big deal. I can update those. Let me just double check.

We got living room, hall on the first floor, dining room, powder room, pantry, kitchen, bedroom on the second floor, closet on the second floor. We have two closets. So this is good.

I'm glad I made the mistake because we can show some of the functionality of the table. We can click right here on row number 10, and we get some options. If we select the cell up in our toolbar, we get some insert rows.

We can insert a row above, and now I can add another closet second floor because we do have two second floor closets. There we go. We can add a row anytime we need.

Now we have an extra row at the bottom we no longer need, and there is a rows area in our toolbar, and we can delete that row. So it works pretty seamlessly like a spreadsheet to add remove rows. We can also copy paste multiple times.

So let's go to the next column. We have refinished original hardwood quite a few times here. So I can click on this first cell, and I can paste that, and I can click return and paste it again.

I've got three in a row. Then we skip past the kitchen to the bedroom second floor, and I can paste all the way down to the main bedroom. So pretty quick, right? And then walk-in closet is carpet neutral, and then bathroom hexagon light gray, and I can copy and paste within our table as well.

So I know that we're also getting that in the powder room. So I can double click and paste there. We pretty quickly get to what we need.