External References Tips & Tricks: AutoCAD 2017 WEBINAR | AutoCAD

hello and thank you very much for coming to our newest webinar for the build your AutoCAD IQ webinar series my name is David Pothier and I'll be assisting today but a main presentation here will be done by now Minh just a quick run-through as to who's here as I said I'm from Manchester New Hampshire I'm an AutoCAD or technical support specialist knellman is one of our expert elites so he's actually not an autodesk employee but he's a great asset to us and has been helping out for many months during the webinars and he's going to be doing our main presentation today and he's out of Ohio and the man behind the curtain helping to answer some questions today is Bryce Dillon and he is out of our lake oswego office he's also in the Autodesk technical support so before we get started here I just want to run a quick poll like we usually do and just basically want to know if this is your first webinar if you've been to one of these in the past and it's not working let's try this again oh I guess we won't do that one says it's closed so we'll try a different one all right we'll try to see which Autodesk product you're using not sure would happen with the other one but looks like we got a kind of a mixed bag here over a third using AutoCAD almost a third using LT alright we'll go ahead and close that and share it so you can see about 37% using AutoCAD and 19 almost 20% using one of the verticals or actually more than that including civil 3d and EPS so it's great alright so we go on from there so before we get started I just want everybody know that you can ask questions in the chat window if you haven't been to one of these before I will answer as many questions we can online and also at the end if we have time left over session is being recorded and you'll find links to all of the materials including the datasets and stuff in the chat window or in the registration reminder or the post webinar survey if you're new to the webinar series we've been doing these for over a year now I've lost track of how many we've done but we've done somewhere around 70 or 80 of these and we basically do it in four different topics so back to the basics beyond the basics or more advanced topics third dimension which deals with things like working in 3d and rendering and then tips and tricks and so this one falls under the back to the basics I believe I forget so you can watch the previous webinars on YouTube there's a link here on the on the PowerPoint slide to get you to those if you are know somebody that wants to join and sign up for the webinars there's a link over on the right hand side where you can sign up there's also link to the Autodesk forums so great information there and if you want to provide feedback and help people or help Autodesk design or influence what's in the next version of AutoCAD or LT there's some links there that will get you to the customer council forums if you definitely with the Autodesk knowledge Network this is a great resource for all things about Autodesk everything from General help to articles written by a tech support to downloads hot fixes and such troubleshooting information etc so it's just knowledge Autodesk comm and it's a great great group of information here so just a quick overview here as to what we're going to be doing now I'm going to be covering external references so you'll get a quick overview of what xrefs are or are what we shortened it down to is xrefs issues dealing with pathing and such when you have a xref that's not resolved and how to deal with that and then just some other settings and stuff that you should be aware of when dealing with xrefs so with that we'll go ahead and pass this over to Naaman and he'll get started with the presentation ok hello everyone how are you I'm just going to get my screen going here ok thank you very much for letting me present today I really appreciate you joining me and Dave and Bryce today we're going to talk about external references and they've mentioned it'll be a basic in the beginning but we'll get into tips and tricks at the end and during the webinar as well so I hope you get great information out of it so let's see so what is an external reference well in autocad external references or anything basically that you want to attach to a drawing there are certain formats that are only available that you can attach the drawing which is I mean basically the DWG file an image a twf you can catch a dgn file which is MicroStation you can also attach a PDF and it has been the case with 20:17 added some new functionalities in terms of PDF you also have the opportunity to attach point cloud and with something new with 2017 is the ability to attach Navisworks NWD model so you can do coordination overlays on your underlays rather on your drawing and be able to work directly with in autocad so that's a really nice feature that they added so basically when you attach something you're linking an object of another file into your project or into your host file and i'm going to be using the host as the file that you are bringing the ex reference in and let's look at the what are the other things that we need to understand with the xref so why do you want to use extras but before I say that let's talk about what extra versus external references so according to official Autodesk glossary extra is referred to as drawing files linked into the mod into the drawing itself so I'm going to use extra for that purpose those who have been using xpress for a long time know the value of it but we use it extensively in our work clothes especially even if it's a small company you are biggest thing that you can first thing you can do is make the title block a X reference as opposed to a block so what what are the other benefits basically this reference is allow you to keep the drawing smaller they also allow you to have the latest and greatest copy so let's say if you have a team working on other drawing you have the ability to reload what they have made the changes and then you see the changes in almost real-time so that allows you to make sure that the drawing is not your drawing is not out of date and you are working with the latest and greatest information it also allows multiple people to work on a prop so you may have multiple file that person may be working on the base map of the site you may be composing the sheets so that's another benefit of using X references and X references are like blocks in AutoCAD but they're externally reference so they appear sometimes that ad block even behind the coding it does but in general they are up they allow you to control a lot more layering and whatnot the blocks are basically part of your current going however X references which is in this case if this going has multiple X references which is based and then couple other existing drawing and the legend you have in this project and they are basically linked in and updated as you open the bottle so anytime I open the file I get the latest and greatest of that look before we begin too far into it let's talk about what this palette is so I'm going to close this palette for a second and to show you how to get into that pouch Naumann oh I lost your display for okay just to make sure you're sharing your screen again okay is that working um I'm working now I'm not saying that Bryce can you confirm if it's displaying okay for you you're a serious okay it's just on my side done okay but I was looking at the audience he was shown all right okay sorry but the little worker moment woke a moment and so let's talk about how do you access a reference so basically you're trying to bring in a drawing into your project or into your file which is your host file and what I will do is if you are doing bad you go to the insert we're trying to bring in and what there is an option right here says insert tab reference panel and there is this small arrow which brings up the external references palette this palace allows you to work with the X references in your join you can do several commands perform several commands on it make changes in this palette we'll talk about what those are in a little bit but let's talk about how this how it helps you visualizing what is an external reference and so if I click on this PD Bay notice that it highlights in the drawing window it allows me to penisy oh these are the objects on that X reference so if you notice I click on the legend and the legend gets highlighted and actually this is my actual going itself so there's one way to work with X references so let's also look at how the commands are working now within the ex reference palette so as I showed you earlier you can easily attach a join up front and we're not going to talk about the other objects here we're just going to talk about drawing and if you are planning to attach a drawing you basically go click the attach button and I'll show you in a minute how that works there are several other commands if you right mouse click on an xref you will be able to make the issues and commands rather than typing them very quickly as opposed to also you can do is if you select an X references and you get the contextual ribbon you have some basic commands available however if you needed to manage the passing we'll talk about how that works you have to go to the external references pan palette okay so let's attach an xref in my drawing I'll go to the again drop-down attachment DWG or I can click on the insert reference panel and click the attach button right here I will browse to my folders and today I'm using a civil data set just to make sure that the civil guys are happy because I've many many times I've seen we were using the taka textural and we see a lot of civil 3d people joining us so I thought maybe you just want to make sure that I use some of that data set as well so let's look at this I click on them attach TV legend that's my drawing that I want to attach so why do I want to get the drawing attachment why do I use the legend so the legend is basically something that I want to repeat going to drawing and I don't want to have it as a block because if it is a block and I make a change I'll have to update like ten drawings if the trend drawings are using it in this case I only have to make one change and I'll demonstrate how that works in a little bit but let's look at how you attach a drawing so it's basically very similar to attaching a block I mean inserting a block you are basically attaching instead of inserting your browse if you wanted to bring a block and you browse if you wanted to bring an external reference then you look at the insertion point typically you say specify on screen in my face I'll do that I'm not going to worry about the scale this is a legend it's one-to-one in my paper space the path type will touch on that little later I'll leave it as it but a good practice these days is that you have to have a relative path which makes it a little bit easier right now I can't user a little path because I have not saved my drawing that one of the limitation that a relative path needs to be relative to the coin so right now I haven't saved the drawing that's why it's not giving me that option so we'll talk about what the reference types are but let's click OK and you can basically click on inserting that extra attach that extra let me repeat that one more time for you so again I want to attach TV legend and click open again set that drawing up and insert it on the paper space where I want to now this one I can attach it to multiple groyne easily so let's open another drawing and look at how I am going to attach this to a another drawing I'm going to open my site layout plan and let's attach that one more time this time I'm going to use it another command of X attached and right here the legend open in this case I'm going to switch this to a relative path which is a good practice to do and why you want to use a relative tab is because of you can just transfer the folder and as long as the structure is the same the drawings can easily be transfer from one server to another from one computer to another I'm going to click OK and attach that extra very quickly and I think I have a local moment as ranae has set cache one more time open click OK and click so now I have this attached so what what is the real benefit of this multiple of them let's say we wanted to fix an issue in this case so I am going to double click on the X reference I'm going to edit it in place this called the reference edit press edit I'm going to click OK and then I think I'm making the changes as I need to and I see that the lines are a little bit you know shorter they don't cover the whole thing they don't line up maybe I wanted to change something else in the drawing and my storm looks like this I know it doesn't but let's for argument's sake do that now I can easily click on this Save Changes AutoCAD will save the reference changes that I made and now my X reference is updated so what benefit did I get to just update it I can do that with a block well if I go to my other growing if I get a notification to say somebody has updated the external reference you want to reload it yes I want to get it the most up-to-date copy of it and notice that it's updated as well so this is a very very excellent benefit of using X references so let's talk about now some other items that affect X references one of them is basically how you would reload I showed you one way you can just right click and reload it easily then the other one is basically let's look at unloading something versus detaching so there is an option for detach versus unloaded a detached option basically completely removed the X reference from a drawing so I will right-click and detach it do not erase it use the detached command because that removes all the references from the system but if you delete it that extra reference and link is still in the AutoCAD drawing you want to make sure that rather than erasing it you want to detach it instead of that so when do I want to use a unload at that point so let's say if I have a reference that I just want to bring in just to kind of take a look and make sure my drawings are correct it's a video capture plan and just basically load it in but I don't want it to show up every day after day so what I'll do is I'm going to right-click on it and this releases it from the memory it doesn't show up no worry about making managing layers or anything like that the next time you reopen the drawing it'll still be unloaded because it persists throughout to the savings and of reopening the file let's say I want to work on this again I'm going to look at this drawing I need to make sure that I can see the reference I'm going to right-click on it and basically reload it quickly and now the extra references that I was looking at has been restored there is a couple other options here now that we're going to touch on win terms off we talked about the passing so let's dive into a little bit more detail so if I right-click on this drawing and if I look at these options available there's one called path and you can convert one path to the other this is a nice feature that they added maybe a few years ago I really like that let's say TV legend so whether it is referenced it is a as a relative or as a full path what does that mean so it is found in my folder but the saved path is this point backslash PB legend this is a Windows Convention basically it says within that same folder this going is found as I said before that it's easy to for you to kind of take away the drawing folder move it to another server or move it to another computer and keep working and your you won't have problems of not having access available to you so the other option was the full path if you notice that in this case the image the safe path is the whole path I'm sorry this one has a local moment again let me attach another X reference the glee as a full-fat to show you what that looks like if I look at that TV legend it hard codes the drive letter basically so if I move this drawing it's going to look for the X references on I see users and my name and what in my profile directory that is basically not makes it harder for transfer drawings to other people and when they get the file they get this error again saying oh these X references are not found we'll talk about how fix those issues but just wanted to point that out what a full path versus a relative path is and how you can switch between the two so let me save this file quickly migrating file now since I have saved this I would be able to convert this one to a relative path as I said relative paths are much much easier to work with so all I do have to do is right-click half pipe make relative and now I have a relative if I save this drawing somewhere copy it over to another computer I'll be able to easily find this X references I won't have any situations where I can't find my drawing which you see that like right here in this case I have some images and to show you later but notice that I can't find them AutoCAD said oh I can't find these drawing right now let's let's solve that problem so if I look at this image I said I won't talk about but this is a very good example right now to fix this and demonstrate this issue so if I click on this attached drawing and it says it can't be found it has been moved or something like that and if you get drawings from consultants that usable path that you can easily convert those paths what needs to happen is basically what you do is you go to the saved path and click on those three ellipse the ellipses button right here then browse to the folder where these images are stored and click open now they are available in my drawing and I'll fix this one as well again one more time you go to the save path you click on the ellipsis right here you have to highlight the name just like you are editing it and then you can click on the ellipsis to browse and I'm going to select drawing or an image or PDF or point cloud or whatever that is but this is how you pick an external references passing issues at the end if we have time to talk about how we can do it in batch hopefully I'm able to get to it but again these are fade full path and I'm going to make them relative make relative and now notice that it is dot dot images and attach and this again is a windows convention up which directly things are in so that brings us to a very good point about what is in attached versus in overlay I will insert another X reference in this drawing go to the model space and again attach another one and let's say maybe this is the grading here you notice that it says reference type this reference type is overlay or attached if I have a growing that is attached and let me go to this graphics I'll come back to this dialog box again so reference size whether it's attached or overlay lets me switch to the other going back where i have the images set up right here if you connect it as an attached object so in this case let's say this is my plan right here the grading and I have another plan that is attached to it notice that this C drawing shows up in a a and when this a drawing is attached it then carries over the see drawing along with it and the master drawing or the host drawing will see both a and C that is what attach means basically it is a nested X reference and it carries throughout the whole linkage that it has in the case of an overlay let's talk about that does so like in this case the B drawing again is attached to the a growing but notice that it is connected as an overlay and when this a drawing is brought into the host drawing you basically see only a and not B the B is coming separately from it so what does that helping them on I can't what should I do this one can I use this the attachment is good or let's say if you have a grid that say you have a grid attachment in the plan or that I wanted to make sure that some of the data that I bring in in this drawing is carried forward to another one so let's show you how that works I reference this going as an attached drawing this legend and I'm going to attach this layout plan into another drawing so I'm going to X reference this again into the cache drawing layout plan and say open and I'm going to be in this case I'm going to overlay or attach it doesn't matter but let's select overlay in this case and I'm going to play it's going to be a big drawing because I place it in model space but let's look at what that does for B notice that it has these images that were patched brought in through the site layout plan but I can't understand which one is at a store which one is lefted there's another view you can use that's right here in this case which is this list view which you is a default then next to it is the preview if you click on the preview you can see that when you bring in site layout plan it will also bring in the base the es 641 this the legend the images along with it I mean do I really need to see those here I don't think those what I'll do is I'm going to say oh no these objects should be overlaid instead of attached and I'm numb in that today as interrupt you for one second there's a was a good question that relates exactly what you're talking about right now and the question is how comes sometimes you see a file attached but you can't detach it and I think that the most common situation there is is what you see in here is you couldn't detach site layout you know the image because it's actually attached to the other file it's nested and when you look at it in the tree view you can see that it's actually a nested file instead of in the other view where you can't really differentiate between what's in the current when it was nested yes thank you very much for pointing that out if that's an excellent point but as I said you know you have nested objects next to that reference is hard to see that in this list view because I mean in this image I can tell because there is this pie symbol between the two but in case of growing that doesn't do that I don't know why but maybe people join in the customer council and I should recommend that to them you have that that's a very good case of joining the summer council for but let's look at this tree view and then it allows you to see all this nesting within the references that's happening and that's basically example up and attached so let's fix that issue I don't want the legend to show through I don't want to fight the images to show through in this case so I go back to my site layout plan and I'm going to go back to my external references and let me close it bring it up again just to make sure that people understand how to get back to it one more time so I go back to insert this arrow key click on it and then again look at these legend this legend so right now it says type it is attached right click I'm going to right click on it and says ex reference type it whether is attached or overlaid well I want it to be overlay because I don't want it to be attached because you notice right here you can also change it at this point as well if you don't want to right click you can do it to the details window I'm going to detach this I mean make it an overlay I am going to I don't think images you can do that functionality but with DWG is the only thing that works with attached and overlaid so let's save the file and somebody you call somebody hey can you fix this issue for me and I yes I did fix it I'm going to go back to my drawing I get a notification hey somebody has modified this drawing let's reload it this is a really nice functionality where you can just click and reload but let's not do that I am going to right click on this in this case and reload the old-school way and when it reloads is notice that TV legend disappeared in this from this list so that's what it means that overlay will not carry over from this point on more into other drawing versus attach will carry over so I showed you how to convert the passing from relative absolute or no path I didn't cover no path and no path means that there is no path on it but there is a little bit of functionality of the no path if you do not have a tap associated with the drawing and I'm convert a drawing from a path drawing that the relative orful I go back in and I say Oh make it a no path to remove the path basically what that does is basically notice that there is no path saved that means if that all these acts references should be in this folder however AutoCAD has a really nice functionality it will look under many other locations as well it will look in the current drawing folder which is this host drawing is in it will also look under your files tab in the so when I look at the options Alaba which is application menu option and under files if you look at this support path AutoCAD will look in all those folders for this file if you have no path associated with it it will also look in the actual AutoCAD icon and it will look at this start in as well path for this drawing and what that allows you to do is basically save the drawing in and transfer it and if you have a flack system of folder and drawing this is helpful to save it just a no path there is one more feature that is very unused I think I mean in it Lisa I didn't know much about it till recent which is the project file search path so you can define these project paths for your let's say I'm working on project a project B project C I can assign different paths to this each project and a path to the project I'm not going to get into too much detail but what that does is that you can select oh I'm working on project right now project one project to whatever that is that's called the project name system variable and it asks you which project name it is and I can say project one in this case and now it will look for all those extra in that object file folder for you so that's a really neat speech that you can use to organize your project this way so now let's talk about some other features that when it comes to ax references hey Dave any questions before I get into a little bit more advanced stuff no there is a question about sharing files with others and I mentioned that you'll be covering etransmit so I'll take care of that stuff okay cool I just wanted to take a breather view so so let's talk about binding and inserting and all you'll see I will trip on bind bind and behind insert and I'll always make a mistake on this is just like a tongue twister for me at least so what does that bind it and extract means a buying an extra basically means as you are trying to take that X reference and convert it into a block that's what that is within the joint so it loses that dynamic updates capability from another file because you are making if this case it's inserted in the OP in the current drawing what's the case for it sometimes we have records going to send to the client we will find it so that client doesn't have to deal with all our fancy collaborators folder structures and rather they just get one file with everything in it and we'll do that in this case there are some limitations and I'll talk about that what those are but let's look at this guy right here which is this which is the legend again one more time I'm going to right click and it says bind and you have you can bind either extracts which is growing or b/g/n underlays so I'm going to bind bind I always twist on this because I said so what does that do let's click on it and let's figure out what the differences are between the two okay so I'm going to click OK and now if I look at this this TV legend disappeared from my external references and this becomes a block so if I go to my properties and I select that object right here it says name TV legend and it is a block reference as opposed to if I click on my title block which also says it's a block reference and that's when I was saying that AutoCAD kind of treats it like that but in the back end of it there is a lot more to it where it says in here that it is an external reference as opposed to be of sorry and that I want on so if you notice that it says an external reference I made a mistake title block is not an external reference so I notice that it says external reference and the safe path in this case there is no path and the name of it and what rotation blah I know size and whatnot it is so you look at the properties and figure that one out but let's look at what that did when we found this object okay so we're the best place to look at it is the layers dialog box and I'll cover some layering now basically so if you notice that if I scroll down all the way this TV legend had one layer in it basically and it says TV - legend dollar zero dollar legend when you bind bind an X reference into a drawing it will convert it will retain the name of the X reference with the delimited delimit in the middle which is dollar one two three four and then the name of the layer coming from that when is the binding beneficial and I'll show you when when I insert a drawing in a second so if we're clear on this I hope this is the delimiter it puts in the middle and then if you are looking at X references itself you can see what layers are a reference layer they are have a little bit halftone to them compared to the layers that are currently in the drawing right here if I look at one I can go into the X reference layers only and where I want to be able to use those if I want to control whether I want to see this X reference layer or not preset colors I can change all my base colors to black and white if I wanted to so I can go in select all those layers and freeze them and maybe not change the colors so I'm going to make it all grey for some reason and what that does is basically updates my background and converts everything to gray that is on that X reference so you can control all the layering up and X reference attached to it a little bit I'll talk about there's a variable that's important but we're going to be able to touch I'm not going to touch on those too much the weight variable name is this retain the CIF retain and that controls whether this layer settings are saved or not so that's the layer right here which we change by default it should be one and I would highly recommend leave it at that so let's quickly do what an insert does so if I right click on this tve X 61 which is right here in X 61 right click extract type of bind and bind insert what that does is basically it will lose all the layering of the name of the ex reference and just bring in the layers of the other joint if you already have a layer existing in this drawing that matches it will assume the properties of the current layer as opposed to the bringing it in where it's useful I talked about the owners record set let's say if you have multiple layouts you want to make sure that you retain the elaborate freeze pause that you have within those viewports you want to extra bind bind it and instead extra insert insert it in our extra bind inserted so that's what the bind and insert does let's talk about to my favorite tools and one of them is the heat transmitted and what that is is I think it started as a well express so I can't remember maybe I think it did and now it's available to dodge at LG and also in the main product course the way you access it is what that does is let's say if I wanted to send a draw point to a consultant or somebody that needed to look at this drawing I can easily do that and rather than figuring out oh I got a send via straw in this drawing this drawing this bro oh you know where all the drawings saved I don't have to worry about all those issues at all with the etransmit functionality closest for a second and where this is a hidden under is application menu publish from one publish click on the air right here is the etransmit again application menu publish with the arrow and get this eat ran of course you have to save the coin before you can not be transmitted but what that does is it figures out all the items that are needed for the X reference and it says okay you grab all the images it'll grab all the clutter definition files it grabs all the X reference files as well as the sheet set and I really don't want to send all my sheet sets and everything like that I just need to send them the basic stuff I can easily uncheck them and if you can you can look at the file table which is the flat view versus a preview that the preview is the default time in this case and if you notice right here it says select a transmittal setup what this allows you to do is set up how you want to send it every single time I want to always send it as a fifth one I want to zip it and send it I don't want to create a folder and say you know create a zip again and then email them however that is or sometimes clients or other consultants as though I need to stay down to version in 2007 2000 whatever that is you can easily customize and create those transmittal set up so you don't have to constantly make those changes so the way you do it but let's talk about that right here it's transmittal setup right now I have save as 2000 but I'm going to select the standard I'm going to create a new from that and now let's say we create a zip and send something like that and what this is a sent transmittal package type folder or zip one we want zip here you can select which different formats you want you can go down to 2000 I'm going to leave them as is and maintain visual fidelity for annotated objects that's a separate topic but basically your text will look exactly the same hopefully as you have intended here in that scale itself and it's going to ask me for prompt me for the name and here it's asking me hey do you want to put it in a folder structure no I just want to put all the files in one folder I don't care I'm just going to send them the drawings and so I say don't have fun for my extra and my folder structures you can send set the plotter or bind the extras no I don't want to bind course the drawings I'm not going to worry about it included on man really I'm not gonna include my materials any data link in photometric styles which Victoria covered last week no cheat data set and I also don't want to include any of my unloaded ex references as well so I'm going to click OK and now I have this zip and sent and close and what that will do is now I don't have to notice that I don't have to uncheck anything for the sheets he said or fonts or anything like that ready to go for me I'm going to click OK I can also as I've mentioned I can also add other file I mean it doesn't have to be anything to do with AutoCAD or let's say I wanted to send the DWF file or whatever it is I can attach that as well you can add more drawing click OK create a zip bundle save this and it saves it onto the sir - your computer and I'm going to browse to that and hopefully I'll be able to find it and right here is my zip bundle and notice all the drawings are available you can email it and be done ok now let's talk about my favorite tool that is hidden from view by default and that is the reference manager so I talked about well it is painful it's going to go in and change all these paths that are not found and what's not somebody moved the folder rename the folder now I have like hundred goings that I have to rename a repast I'm that's gonna take a lot of time I really don't want to do that and not in the mood I'm all about efficiency here so what I'm going to do is not even working on that at this point and launch a separate software that has always been there and it's called reference manager and let's launch that what that does is basically it allows you to modify the path in bulk and way it works I'm going to add the drawings here and let's pick this up right here Evan R and this is my architectural ref manager what I had done was I renamed this folder from basically ref2 rs2 xref basically so I'm going to just select all my sheet files that are here and click open what it's asking me is whether do you want to bring in all the attached and nested of X references we talked about extras net attached and overlays or just the first level now I said I want everything and you can see that it has you can want to see what bonds are in the drawing you can't make changes but you can see whether those fonts are found on your computer or whatever you're testing it as a result same for configuration lost style if you are switching servers or standards whatever this is a good way to connect check your work any shape files are missing no but this is a real benefit right here if you look at the X references notice that you have this status not found this view is really hard to work with I have to do basically one extra at a time there is another view if you go to this view menu and say lift by drawing if you listed by drawing what that allows you to do is make changes much much faster if you see this guy right here you have a flash icon on it it's very hard to see with the screen resolution and or the flame that means that this drawing is good there are no issues with the flash there is an issue with the edge okay so let's switch back to the other drawing and I think I may have send it by this by default this is the mist micro is the view that you get by default and I have switched it before so let's list by reference type click on x-ray it shows you all the extras that are not found and it says oh what is the path the safe path is got back slash ref1 what's going to select all the X references right-click and say edit select path I can do find and replace so let's say if I wanted to sort res and somewhere to change it into backstrap or you can browse you can do that I'm just going to edit the path right click Edit selected path and instead of res I'm going to call it extra click OK and notice now I have selected them converting them to the right path all of the X reference is resolved I'm good to go I can save this at this point because you have to apply the changes I'm going to apply the changes here and it's a hey do you want to do this yes I do want to do this here and click OK and all your extracts are fixed in one jiffy so hop with I guess since I see this dot back 5 X of F is that a full path for a relative path I guess you can type your answer in the question I'll flip rice gets bombarded by this questions you know all those that think are easy pellets all those are think that's a relative path raise your hands oh ok can't see you but raise your hand that's a good one type it in yeah this is the one there's a race end but perfect thanks des for the rescue base price place anything here oh boy almost that's killed okay so now you just gave him do I have your best secret so now you know we put a whole bunch of people out of a job because they don't have to manually change all the paths on their crest oh yeah I mean that that's my by far my favorite tool and that's hidden like anything it's not access to AutoCAD you have to go through the Start menu to get to it and it isn't it wasn't often - and it isn't often it already it also looks like it's not in LT as just looking under the LT folders and so it looks like it's only provided with AutoCAD the full AutoCAD I'm sorry F I did not realize that yep but this was a part of the expressible so I think that would be the case at this point yeah Oh since I have a couple more minutes left hey can I show them couple things or you will not let it out I'll give you one one minute to show how to freeze a layer without going to the oh yeah about that one yeah some of the layer of the tools here the problem is I can't freeze layers here easily because I need to figure out what the layer this object is on oh I can quickly do that if I go to home and go to the layer panel and notice that this is a freeze button if you click freeze and click on the object right here and set freeze and pick those now only that layer about frozen if you do it to a viewport it will only through the through the viewport and it's an awesome tool and a couple other extra Express tools that I use with extra are X list I'm going to type it in since I don't have much time this was kind of bonusing anyway you can click on an object it tells you what those are and there's another one that I do it uses under blocks I use copy nested blocks and I can copy objects from the xref and one last one last right-click if you right-click on an xref you get the X reference you can click the X ref like images which can make it smaller but this open X trap allows you to open it make the changes that you need and save it and now reload it back where you quickly rather than editing it in context you do it the other way around so thank you very much for letting me present today I hope you were able to get something out of it let they take over alright thanks darlin and there's a some great stuff especially the the quick 1 minute at the end there some really cool tools so just to wrap up a few things here there's also some additional resources that's in the PowerPoint so I have some links here to the trials for AutoCAD LT just make sure that everybody knows that there's been some recent hot fixes for AutoCAD 2017 for both AutoCAD and lt one of the issues that we've been having quite regularly in AutoCAD is in migrating custom settings so hotfix 3 fixes a lot of the issues with migrating custom settings so if you're having problems with that make sure you download the hot fixes and have the latest greatest tools from from our development team you know just again thank you for joining us we are just about out of time see if there's any quick questions that I can ask real quick let's see yeah the the couple of things that I'm I was talking about like X list and stuff those are in express tools so they're not in LT just about everything else you saw today was available in both AutoCAD LT though there was a question about unreconciled layer layers I don't think we can get into that in the you know just a minute or so there was another one in there that what layer you bring the current extra what layer is current when you bring the extra pen yes it is important that you pay attention to the layer we typically have an extra layer or you can bring it down zero but I typically recommend an extra layer for it yeah so he's asking about PDFs and yes you can attach a PDF but you can now in 2017 also convert PDFs to geometry as long as it's a vector-based PDF file so if you recommend people if you haven't seen that before and it definitely looks like there are a bunch of people that weren't familiar with the reference manager because they was like where is it where is it so we put the link in there it is in the application menu so you have to go and browse to it it's not part of OTO Cabot's but it's installed with AutoCAD if you want information on how to import or convert PDFs into geometry probably the best place to go to is the what's new in AutoCAD 2017 webinar so I just go to the YouTube page and go look for that webinar and that feature is covered in that webinar and can LT convert PDFs pretty sure that that's in there I don't see why that would not be in LT so I'm sure that that's well ninety nine and a half percent sure that that's an LT all right and looks like that's that was another one if I okay good thank you yeah it would take one more no I was just one quick another comment was if you change a color on the base xref does it change it in the reference drawing not really it doesn't do it it's unless and until you use this retain that zero but I would not recommend that this retain is a great source of tech support cases so if you haven't if you don't know what this retain does look it up in the help file alright and again just thank everybody for joining us so go ahead and end the webinar at this point it's a top of the hour and look forward to seeing all of you back at our next webinar next week same time same channel thanks and have a great rest of your day

Channel: AutoCAD

Views: 37,737

Keywords: autocad, autodesk, autocad 2017 webinar, autocad 2017 tutorial, autocad 2017 external references, autocad webinar, webinar, autocad tutorial, autocad how to, autocad tips and tricks, cad tips and tricks, autocad external references, xrefs, 3d drawing, modeling tutorial, build your autocad iq, xref attachment, overlay, underlay, 3d modeling, animation, software, cad, 2d animation, tutorial, how to, simulation, cad design, autocad 2d, computer animation, auto cad, 3d animation programs

Id: eAyD6LfTmPM

Length: 59min 44sec (3584 seconds)

Published: Fri May 20 2016