Slope or Grade Label

Civil 3D is dumb. Just the other day I was placing labels on the plans and I remembered an age old convention:

“If the grade is flat use a percent label, if it’s steep use a slope label.”

If that is a convention I run into time after time, then why does Civil 3D by default make me choose the correct style? Wouldn’t it be easier to have one label adjust based on the grade? Well we can overcome this obvious deficiency in Civil 3D by building a grade/slope label that does just that. We can create two expressions. One will return a positive number if a percent is required and a negative value if a slope is required. The other will do the exact opposite. Then we combine those into one label by setting the expression value to not show if it’s negative. That way we get one label to do both jobs. No longer having to place a label and then realize you have to swap it for another one. If you want to show a negative sign, then you are out of luck.

Here is a link to a file with an example.