Two tipsters sent advice to address the fact that when you leave a regular or custom property blank in AutoCAD’s Sheet Set Manager, the referencing field in your drawing will display and print "----" instead of blank.

To get this field to show up blank, Scott Loadman recommends: "Enter %%U in the property box. This is a character, but it does not print. I use this mostly on sheet titles in a title block, which may have up to four lines for a description of the sheet. Some of our sheets only need two lines of printed text so I end up with two blank lines and I don't want to see '----.'"

CAD Manager Jeff Paulsen offers an alternate method: "Type Alt+0160 as the value for the custom property, and the field will turn out blank. You have to use the keypad when typing 0160. This works for most SHX fonts that ship with AutoCAD, and works with all of the True Type fonts that I've tried it on."

Notes from Cadalyst Tip Patrol: Displaying text the way you want in a sheet set is very important; these tips can help you do that and save time too. For example, these options can help you minimize the number of templates you create for a project (when the number of fields in a sheet set might vary from file to file) or when a field will be required later in a project but the information isn’t available yet.