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Michael Kinnear/4 min read

Bringing Data Shortcuts into Your Drawing: Step-by-Step Guide

Data Shortcut Import

1

Set Working Folder

Set Working Folder if not already pointing to project root.

2

Open Prospector

Toolspace > Prospector tab > Data Shortcuts node.

3

Right-Click Object Type

Surfaces, alignments, etc. — Create Reference.

4

Reference Now Live

Object accessible in current drawing; updates if source changes.

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This tutorial walks through bringing data shortcuts into your drawing, covering essential tools and techniques for your projects.

Okay, so now that we've created these data shortcuts, what we need to do now is bring that data into the current drawing. We're currently in our civ203grad.dwg file, and we need to bring in surfaces from the civ203data.dwg. We have these data shortcuts here.

What you can do to bring that information in is you can go ahead and expand out what you want. So a surface, we're going to go ahead and bring in our civ203surface, which is our existing toposurface. I'm going to go ahead and right-click.

I'm going to go ahead and select Create Reference. You have the options for open source drawing or promote. So I'm going to go ahead and click Create Reference.

Now what Civil 3D is going to go ahead and do is it's going to ask me how I want to reference that surface inside of my own drawing. So I have the option for what is the name, what's the description, and what's the style. I'm going to leave it as civ203 so that I have call back to what it's called in my data shortcuts, but I am going to go ahead and choose a new style.

I'm going to go ahead and click on the ellipsis. I'm going to drop down, and I'm going to choose ex-topo. So that object style that we created in our drawing template file, we're going to go ahead and use it now and have it displayed using that object style inside of our drawing.

So I'm going to go ahead and click OK. I'm going to click OK. When I do that, Civil 3D is bringing that surface into the drawing.

So what I'm going to go ahead and do now is I'm going to type Zoom. I'm going to type E for Extents, and Civil 3D brings me to the surface that I have inside of this drawing. Now if I go to my Prospector tab and I go to Surfaces, you'll notice that I have my civ203 surface in this drawing, and you'll notice this little icon next to the text.

That is the symbol that means that this is a data reference inside of your drawing. So I'm going to promote another surface into my drawing. We're going to go ahead and go to my Dev Branch End.

We're going to actually bring in all of these surfaces as proposed surfaces. So I'm going to go ahead and right-click. I'm going to go ahead and Create Reference.

So I'm going to march from Dev Branch End all the way to Highway Dev Main Int Surface. So those are intersection surfaces. So what I'm going to go ahead and do is Dev Branch End Surface.

I'm going to change my style. I'm going to change it to Design, and I'm going to click OK. I'm going to click OK.

So there it is down here. I'm going to go ahead and right-click, Create Reference, Design Topo, click OK. Select Dev Main Branch, right-click, Create Reference, Design Topo, click OK.

Main End, right-click, Create Reference, Design Topo, click OK. Right-click, Create Reference, Design Topo, click OK, right-click, Create Reference, Design Topo, click OK, and then right-click, Create Reference, Design Topo, click OK. And so what we're gonna see in here now is that up in our Surfaces we have all of those surfaces referenced into our drawing, and then when you look in the window over here, we have all of those surfaces available to view.

So I can go to Object Viewer, and I can view my Dev Main inside of my Object Viewer. So I can rotate it out, and we can see what that surface looks like. So I'm gonna go ahead and press Escape.

I'm gonna go ahead and save, and then I'll go ahead and meet you in the next video.