AutoCAD - How To Use Sheet Sets

hey what's up guys welcome back to you can draft this is ryan and today i want to talk about sheet sets now i'm not going to go over sheet set creation just sheet set usage um because sheet set creation will usually be handled by some kind of a project manager cad manager project lead of some kind and most of you are probably just going to need to know how to use the sheet set not necessarily modify the sheet set template and it's a much longer video that i will do on uh sheet set creation and template creation and so on and so forth but for now let's get into um how to use a sheet set and what sheet sets are if you have absolutely no idea what sheet sets are they're essentially drawing management from within autocad um a lot of times uh companies who don't use sheet set manager will just um have you open files through your file explorer and so you'll just go navigate to your network drive double-click a file draw in it and close it and save it and everything else um what sheet set does is allows you to have a place to organize all of your files inside of autocad and access them and even print them through the sheet set manager and you can see that by a couple ways so to open sheet set manager what you can do is go to your ribbon view tab and just hit sheet set manager or if you don't use the ribbon you can go to view sorry view tools palettes and the sheet set manager is there you can also hit control 4 or if you like the 2 key or your aliases just type in ssm and it will open up your sheet set manager so i'm going to turn off the auto hide on my sheet set manager so you can see what i've got here i have an example sheet set that i made for my you can draft facilities that i am envisioning what i've done is i've created a sheet set based off of the example sheets that autocad gives you they have some architectural imperial sheet sets this manufacturing one and a civil one i chose the architectural one which is basically just architectural type layout um and and the different disciplines they're in what we've got is a a root a parent uh sheet set this is the overall sheet set here you can see listed underneath it we have subsets this is ways to divide up your drawing so they're not just listed all in sequential order you can actually have them divided up into these subsets by discipline or however you need to by area whatever your method is um find out whatever your project is using and put your drawings in the appropriate location when you open up the sheet set manager for the first time um in a session actually you won't have anything loaded um you may have something under recent but most likely if you haven't accessed the sheet set for the for your current project then you won't have anything under recent so you'll need to go to open and you'll need to navigate to wherever your sheet sets are mine's here sheet set and then there's my dst file which is the sheet set file itself then oops it opens up the sheet set after that once you do that when you go to recent you'll be able to see it there every time and so you won't have to go to open each time you want to access it also if you're accessing multiple projects when you go to reason you click those different projects those projects will stay open until you right click and say close sheet set so you can actually flip back and forth between multiple sheet sets of different projects okay so let's go through what you're going to need to know to use the basis of sheet set the most basic things you're going to need to know is how to create and access drawings and even print drawings from the sheet set so let's say that um i want to create an architectural floor plan i have an empty sheet set i'm the first one in here and i want to create an architectural floor plan what i will do is i will go into this section i will right click and say new sheet i'm going to be prompted with this box right here in this box i can give it a drawing number a sheet title um and a custom file name if i need to it's showing me where it's going to be saved to and it's showing me the template that it's being pulled from now i've already created a template ahead of time based off of the uh again one of the default autocad templates um and then you can choose whether you want to open it in the drawing editor right away so that you can work on it or not so here i'm just gonna give a drawing number of a10 now i don't need to do anything else this isn't the file name this is just the drawing number and i'm going to call this a10 i could say a sorry not a10a zero one headed backwards uh because you could like a 1.0 a 1.1 that kind of thing but i'm just going to do a01 um and for my sheet title i'm just going to say floor plan for my file name i'm not going to put anything and usually this actually automatically fills in i don't know why i didn't do it this time i think actually i know exactly why it's because i clicked inside this box so let me cancel that again and show you exactly what happens go to new sheet if i start typing a 1 0 or 0 1 you can see that it's actually entering it here and if i put a sheet title it'll do the same if i put floor plan it will add floor plan to the file name now let's say i actually don't want a floor plan next to i don't want any descriptor in the file name i just want the file name to say a01 well in that case anytime you want it to stop autofilling this just click inside this box the moment you click out of it no matter what you do here it will no longer start autofilling anything in that box and so i can still have it as ao1 so you can prevent that from happening i know my company um we under the the the the drawing number the drawing number is the same as the file name i don't want to see the sheet title in the file name so i i will make sure to not include the sheet title in the file name in this case i want to include it so i'm going to say floor plan and i don't need to open in the drawing editor right now this isn't really for the purposes of um of uh drawing anything i just want to show how we're creating a drawing so we say okay and there's my sheet let's say i need to create an elevation new sheet let's say that the elevation is a you know o5 there's enough other sheets between there so a05 elevation oops elevation or elevations okay say okay now say we have a structural drawing maybe we have a framing drawing new sheet f01 or we'll call it s for structural s01 uh framing roof framing plan hit okay and so you can see how we're we're creating this nested structure of files uh where we're able to kind of go back and forth between them and get information about them by hovering over them or double clicking them to open so let's say i want to start working on my floor plan i double click it once i'm here you can see it's already loaded with the template it's not a blank drawing and that's because when i created this drawing you see that when i hit new sheet it's pulling from a template i already have set up in that template it's basically as if i made a copy of that template did a save as and and called it this drawing it's got the the the border it's got all the layers that are included in that template any of the the text styles any of the dimension styles uh oops dimension styles they're already there everything i need based on my template is already here at this point i can go and start drawing editing modifying the title block all this stuff is just attributes part of the block that you can just double click and fill in um if you're not too familiar with uh block attributes which are very common in title blocks um i i have a i think an uh intro video or one of the videos i have goes over um block attributes so um okay so we've got drawing creation what about drawing um printing right this is again a really popular one that you're going to use quite a bit you could print straight from your sheet you're doing a singular print not a problem but you can also batch print without having to go into the publish dialog um and the way to do that is select all the drawings that you want to print let's say you want to print the architectural you right click you go to publish now you can publish straight to dwf or pdf but what you're going to want to do is really publish using your page setup override and the reason you want to do that is because the page setup override when you look at the um page setup manager for this it's already got um a page set up here with a with a printer that's already been set this should already be set up for you in your template you don't have to you know if you were to do a manual print here like this and go pick one of these um well really it's just this one if you were to pick this you'd have this page set up already in your drawing and you'd pick this preset configuration where it changes your plotter your paper size your your fit and scale and all that stuff for you well we're basically accessing that from here but what we're saying is i want you to access the page set up override and there may be more than one maybe you have two different printers 11 by 17 printer and a 24 by 36 printer you picked the appropriate page setup override and you're saying i want every one of these drawings no matter what in that drawing i want every one of those drawings to use this override okay and you want to do that because it's going to have the most current settings according to your organization or your project it's going to have everything set up the way you want so you're really going to want to use setup override and you really only again only need to do this if you're printing multiple sheets like a whole set and you want to just like set it and forget it and let it run it's a little bit it's quite a bit faster than than doing a uh a publish option and you have some other publish options here that are pretty self-explanatory um you know for publishing to dws or pdfs but majority of the time when you're printing you're you're printing to a set just and uh just choose one of your page setup overrides and i guarantee you um your project will if you if you do any amount of printing to pdfs your project will have a page set up specifically for pdfs you won't even use the one that's here so okay so you've got drawing creation we've got drawing printing through page setup overrides and what if you want to let's say rename a drawing you can do that by saying rename and renumber so let's say that i need to rename this floor plan to a02 maybe a01 is for architectural notes so i need to say rename and renumber from this point i can change the number here but nothing's happening to the file name unless i manually specify hey this needs to get renamed to a02 on the file name as well when you do this make sure you don't have any clashing file names already you don't have any a file that exists that says this so you change the number here if you don't change the number the um the file name uh here as well it won't change it you have to change uh this file name here under the layout name uh oh i am completely trippin i'm in the drawing i can't so rename every number on this one now you can do it i keep messing with layout name this is your layout name it's file name and the reason i couldn't modify it on a104 plan i'm in the file okay there we go so under file name this is the one you have to modify so if i change it here like a05 to a06 i have to come back here and change this to a06 for it to take effect so i say okay a06 is updated here then we go to my drawings and there's here it is a06 notice a05 is the backup because i haven't actually saved it more than once so it's still showing a05 for the backup but if i save it it'll change actually this will always be here because uh this will just make a new a06 backup so keep keep track of your backups maybe delete the ones you don't need sometimes you need to rename something but you don't need to rename the file name you just need to rename the description this might be be changed to uh north elevation and it's just for the purposes of renaming within the sheet set so you just change the name of the sheet title and just say okay and there's our our name this name has nothing to do with the file name it has nothing to do with the title block it's just for you and your team to s to see an explanation of what's going on in the sheet set manager so you can easily identify what drawing is what you can also rename your layout to match your sheet title and it'll just change it automatically so that your sheet title like this name here will match this well actually it's you're modifying the sheet um title to match the sorry the uh the layout name which is the tab right here your you want it to match the sheet title which is whatever you specify here you can also prefix it with the sheet number so it'll say you know a06 north elevation down here instead of just north elevation um you can also rename your drawing file to match the whole thing automatically it's up to you there's options here but that's how you can rename and renumber you can also choose to do a whole sequence notice how it says previous because i can go to the previous drawing in this set and edit that one so i can edit it and then go to next and then edit that and so on and so forth so within a subset you can just keep hitting next and rename if you've got to remember number or re uh name a bunch of drawings you can do that okay this right click menu is it's got a lot of nice stuff in here open read only is great when you don't want to you want to open a file quickly and read only because you don't want to make modifications by accident you got that import layout a sheet okay let's say i got this drawing here okay i'm going to close that sheet i shouldn't close the sheet set manager i should well it's fine okay so let's say i got this sheet and i'm going to do a save as and i'm going to call it ao2 now somebody created this without going to the sheet set manager or maybe they just had another file they copied over and just modified it and you need to import it in there how do you do that we open our sheet set manager we right click and we say import layout as sheet browse for drawings go find that floor plan and say open okay now if it's a clean drawing that has never been part of another sheet set you won't get this message but since i did a save as of 8.01 or a01 whatever it's warning me warning this layout or the uh this layout what does it say whole thing may belong to another sheet set it doesn't because it's brand new um well not brand new but it's it's just it's a copy of one that used to so that's why i get that warning um even even the layout name still says a01 floor plan so we're gonna say import checked we get ao2 floor plan as the name or the number actually or actually the whole the whole name and the reason it says a one floor plan that's the name of the layout tab so i'll just remember the whole thing a02 floor plan two layout name we're just gonna call this layout one like like the default um i'm in this file so i can't um modify this which is kind of a bummer and i forgot about that which i would have done the first let me close out of this say yes so this little lock symbol goes away that lock symbol indicates that i can't modify it and sometimes it may take a little while to go away you can see i closed the file up but the lock icon is still there let me go back to rename and renumber there it's gone now now i can change this to um there we go a02 floor plan i'm matching the sheet title and the number so ao2 floorplan is what i want hit okay there we go and now i've got them here a01 floor plan you know two floor plan so we're we're good to go there now look they're a little bit out of order though which brings you to my next thing organization it doesn't automatically put things in and like a numerical order like you think it would um you're going to have to manually move things around if you happen to create them out of order but you can just drag them around if you need to do that if you need to remove a sheet you can also do that you can just say okay you know what i actually don't need this floor plan too i'm going to remove it it letting you know first of all it's a confirmation box so you don't accidentally remove something but also noting that the layout and the drawing file will not be deleted so you say okay what that means is when you go back to your file manager this file is still here so don't think that just because you removed it it's gone forever it's not it's still in your your your folder structure all right lastly you have properties now um in this one because we don't have any custom properties set and i didn't i probably should have that's probably going to be under my custom properties section what happens is you have some things that you can modify like sheet title sheet number this description include for publish and expected layout this basically says what what drawing is it's supposed to be attached to and it's giving me the drawing a01 floor plan um and then some other minor things your company may have a a nice little complex title block and in that title block will be fields that you're not supposed to edit because those fields are smart fields that are tied back to the sheet set and what will happen is you will enter that information under the custom properties things like your project name your project number uh who drafted it with the date it was submitted and checked and things like that everything you would expect to see in a title block so instead here where you see attributes and they're just static text fields instead instead of that you'll see something like um i don't know let's do create date notice how it's grayed out you'll see a field with a value that's already preset if the value is not in there it looks like it'll say x or dash or something but if the value exists it will be grayed out and it'll have the value okay um in the case of of your drawing your company may have a whole list of um custom properties to fill out inside of here in fact i can just show you one of them let's go to properties let's go to um edit custom properties i'm just gonna do this real fast so look how it has the uh this is a good one the client name project address project number let's see do i have a client name on here no but let's say i want to add the project name uh which actually should already be here but we're gonna say project name default value ycd uh facilities owner is the sheet set said okay oh i guess it's not letting me use it oh project name um um week ycd facilities all right hit okay hit okay i'm going to edit this block real quick so bear with me so you can see what i'm doing here do we have a um let's assume this is the the company the client name okay title here we go owner under owner i'm gonna put a field i'm gonna go to current sheet [Music] custom i'm going to say project name actually it's current sheet set custom let me make sure that i have a safe ktt sink yeah i kind of thought it might not let's do this let's see what the properties of it is project name right yes oh the tag is owner okay so we're gonna that's probably why i couldn't uh name where'd you put we're gonna put name name one uh owner and i i just created one of these and i'm already figuring because the whole process for sheet set creation is really quirky ctrl f current sheet set custom there it is i don't know why i wouldn't show me it earlier okay there we go okay so you can see i guess i got how to do it from here not the block what will happen is this should already be filled in for you this is a field with preset information you can see how these custom property names match these custom property names now you shouldn't be able to edit these you might be able to but they're under these edit custom properties and i can get rid of name one now um all of these right here are pre-filled i could change this to what if i change this project name to you know um i don't know amazon and do a regen i get that it changes it there you don't want to edit the global properties for your job because uh that's probably something a project manager a project lead has set my point is you're going to have a lot of custom property you might have a lot of custom properties much like this on your drawing that are drawing specific and those things are going to be like designed by checked by approved by the file name even the file name here probably you can this will this won't even be actually this won't even be on your sheet set it'll just be like like a file name and it'll be file name only and probably no extension right it'll probably show the extension and then it'll have text options on top of that like i don't know three quarter inch or something or whatever you get my point so um let me regen this when you are in this properties menu i'm trying to reiterate this enough i wish i could show you i didn't have all this set up and i probably should have but you'll have information you can enter in here and then when you hit okay and you go back to drawing and you regen all that information will show up automatically there are smart fields meant to pull information from the sheet set that's tied to each other you don't worry about creating it right now but i want you to know how to access it and that's how you would access it probably um through the block it's probably already set up through the block you don't even have to do anything here it'll just be set and you just right click properties and enter the information there so um last thing you might be recall like be asked to do is create a sheet list table and this i don't have a i don't have a table set up but it may be um it's it's basically and like a drawing index and you have to choose like a range i only have this one change like selected let's see if i can do two of them insert sheet list table and so it did both drawings there i'm not sure if it'll do it cross section it might yeah it did so and you can set your table styles for this again this may this may be out of your realm but it might be in your realm if that's the case you're gonna have to come to your uh table styles and come in here and modify set up your table get all that stuff to good to go because when you insert a sheet list table um you'll have to you know choose like you know what you want to include look look you can choose the parent so we can choose like this and this oh no i didn't i didn't want to include it so there's a bunch of options you can tweak i don't want to go through all that because first of all it's pretty self-explanatory you can see that here it's pretty intuitive choosing a table style name you can modify your styles and then uh title text and then the column settings which you can uh choose any one of these you know values if you want to be included and then you can actually write in what the heading is this is the data type and this is the heading names just a sheet number sheet number sheet title sheet title and then this is what i have in those um i could i could choose file name if i wanted to in here somewhere i'm sure drawing oh actually they don't choose file name but they got sheet number title sheet title description and then a bunch of other extra stuff so and then under sheets and subsets this is stuff you want to um include uh in your um in your table so that's that's basically it there's not too much to to say about that but it's for drawing index creation you may draw your drawing indexes manually or you might want to use this to create your drawing indexes so okay i think i'm done talking to you off for now on this one i think we've got enough to get you introduced into i know kind of some sections i'm taking too long on some session some sections i'm blazing through nothing ever goes really seamlessly especially with me i'm very off the cuff i kind of say things as they come to me so but i want to kind of get this stuff out to you to so you can see how to use sheet sets um sheet set creation is something i will go over uh but it's much longer and i may have to break that up into multiple sections because you know you have to talk about how to set up the template first and then how to create each one of these sections on your own um and then how to work with making custom fields and properties and that's something that definitely you'd probably do if um maybe if you're called on to do maybe you want to just know how to do it so that you can put yourself in a good position uh when somebody asks can you create sheet sets or does anybody know how to create cheeseheads like yeah i do you know it looks good for the resume tell you that much um so uh but yeah that's that's all you're gonna need to know is uh drawing creation with this this new sheet um importing sheets that are already created um renaming and renumbering sheets removing them and then publishing them uh inserting a sheet table list table if you need to for your drawing index and then just properties uh where you can adjust all this stuff independently um when you when you want to get back to sheet set you can hide it you can close it it's a palette so it can be hidden um you can just say a anchor left anchor right in the loud docking and then you can auto hide it i do that a lot um you can you know close your sheet set bill i have a whole list of these things at work where i'm just going back and forth between jobs and recent you know and i'll have three of them open at once because i'm just bouncing between different jobs and it's nice to be able to just see the drawings here instead of having to go to my file manager browse to my network drive and try to figure out where my my files are at i can just come through here and quickly see them you know organize by drawing number and double click the one that i need and so on and so forth so uh there you have it um last thing i guess is a subset i forgot about that real quick let me throw this in here if you need to create a new subset and you are approved to do so just right click and say new subset and you can give it a new name and we'll just you know call this fun stuff um creating a folder hierarchy do you need this or not set it to no uh for now if all if you go into your project folder and all your files are in the same folder you don't have a folder hierarchy but notice how i've got on this one i had architectural civil structural if you go into your project folder and you've got all those folders that match these subsets you've got a folder hierarchy so i'm going to say no and then everything else is pretty much the same this is the new sheet location where are you going to create the new sheets um when you do create them and then which template are you going to use and then prompting for template do you want to do you want to ask you for a template every time no and there is our new uh oops i actually put it inside of uh landscape it should be under ycd there we go so i act because i right clicked on landscape instead of right clicking on ycd for subset you can create a subset of a subset there's that too so there's my new subset and i can create new drawings within that so all right well hopefully that helps if you have questions uh feel free to post them in the comments uh i always answer questions um try to clarify i know i talk fast a lot of times and it can be kind of hard to understand so but i hope you got what you needed out of this

Channel: You Can Draft!

Views: 1,358

Keywords: autocad, cad, sheet, set, manager, drawing, file, how to, create, use, publish, print, template

Id: PUnPyEgA_zQ

Length: 30min 43sec (1843 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 16 2021