Creating New Sheet Sets by Existing Drawings
Are you looking for project management tools within AutoCAD? Never fear, AutoCAD Sheet Sets are here! AutoCAD provides two methods for adding new Sheet Sets: Using an Example and Existing Drawings.
When you already have the drawings, there is little need to go through the rigmarole of defining the new set, building views, creating new sheets, adding the views to the sheets, etc, etc. Why would you? Especially considering you already have the sheets with the views! However, just because you already have the drawings doesn’t mean you cannot use Sheet Sets to help manage these drawings.
The only catch is the drawings must be using Paper Space Layouts, AutoCAD will ignore drawings with no layouts.
Creating a New Sheet Set
The process starts from the Sheet Set Manager. From the main drop-down select New Sheet Set. The first step is selecting the type. An example allows you to select an existing Sheet Set which is used as the template. When you have existing drawings and you don’t want to start from scratch, use the Existing drawings option.
Next, we set the Details. This includes the name, description, and location for the sheet set data (DST) file. The DST stores the details about the Sheet Set.
With the details set, select Sheet Set Properties to adjust the properties. This includes meta-data and also template type features including the View Lable blocks, Callout blocks, Model view, and other settings [We’ll be talking about these in much more depth in future articles].
Now, browse and select the folder or folders containing the drawings to add. Although all the drawings from the selected folders are added automatically you can deselect any drawing not required or wanted. The Import Options provide options to prefix the sheets and to create subsets automatically based on the folder structure.
The final step is reviewing the details before creating it. If satisfied with the settings click Finish.
So the process of creating a new Sheet Set collecting existing drawings is very quick and easy. It provides a method to manage these existing drawings without requiring any changes to the drawings. Really, is there any reason why you shouldn’t be using Sheet Sets?
Feature Image “Sheet” by Jason Pratt.
