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Al Whitley/4 min read

Integrating Construction Documents: CAD File Organization and Updates

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This AutoCAD tutorial walks through integrating construction documents: cad file organization and updates, covering essential tools and techniques for your projects.

Let's begin integrating our construction documents. Again, when we initially created these drawings in CAD 301 and CAD 302, everything was flat. All of the files were located within the same folder.

What we've now done is we've moved drawings into designated folders that conform with the CAD standards and with our office standards, and we have also renamed the drawings. So let's begin by going File, Open. I'm going to go into CAD 304.

Now we have VDCI, and even though VDCI is the name of the school, we are using VDCI as the project name. So I'm going to double-click on VDCI. And when I double-click on VDCI, you can see that I have four folders.

I have where the blocks are located, where my CDs are located, where details are located, and where XREFs are located. If I go up a level, you can also see we have our Corporate Blocks, and this is where we would be keeping the standard company-wide block drawings. So I'm going to double-click on VDCI, go into CDs, and the first drawing I'm going to work on is the AS100, and I'm going to go Open.

Now you can see the preview image right here. Now remember that every time you save a drawing that AutoCAD does a screen capture of what the drawing looks like. So right now, the last time we were in this drawing, this is what the preview looks like.

So I'm going to go Open, and what you're going to see is it looks a lot different. It's coming up with a notification here saying, "Do you want to update the location of the references, or do we want to ignore unresolved references?" What I'm going to do right now is just say Ignore them, so we can go over and solve things. If I back off here, if you remember, we had two spatial environments.

We had the layout paper space, and we had the model space. So right now, you can see that this drawing is looking in the CAD302 folder for the title block drawing. It's also looking in the CAD302 folder for the keynotes document.

If I go into my model space environment, you'll see that the house that we had traced on top of our drawing is there, but the actual metes-and-bounds drawing is not there. So this is simply the notification saying that drawings are not being found. If I go over to my XREFs environment, you can begin to see that it's not finding a lot of these drawings, which is what we know.

We know that what it's doing is it's looking for these drawings in this folder. So I'm going to click right here on the CAD302 Meet drawing. Now, we need to go to the PDF that lists what the new drawing file names are.

If I look at the document, you can see that the CAD302 Meet drawing is now called the VDCIC-CSMeet drawing, and it is in the XREFs folder. So I will highlight the CAD302 Meet reference name, and you can see down here that it remembers where the data file was. So I will select on that, and here's my Choose the Location option, and it's going to my C drive, CAD304, VDCI.

It's in the XREFs folder, and this will be my VDCIC-CSMeet drawing. I'm going to go Open, and for right now, I'm going to close this interface. So you can see that it has brought the data files in.

If I go into my Layer Properties, and I will expand this list. I'll just make the names longer. You can see that it is still remembering the original name of the metes-and-bounds drawing, even though we've now formally renamed it.

But it's simply saying that the data files are in a new location. I'm remembering what the file names were. If you wanted to, you could always detach the XREFs and totally rebuild it, and when you totally rebuild it, it will update the name, the formal name of the data file.

But since what we're doing is remapping, this deliverable sheet file remembers the original name of the file that was being referenced in, and we're simply remapping information back to where it was. We've now taken care of things in model space. I'm going to go up to my 22x34 environment, and when we come back, we'll start working on updating the information in the layout environment.