Layouts and Drawing Management

[tim.j.sparks]

I have reach a point in a project where my experience end so I have come here

There is a project for a building.

I have two dwg, some with duplicate information. The problem is I want to bring all the information together so I can remove a little human error and free up a bit more of my brain for the actual work.

Each dwg has different set of layouts(sheets).

What I would like to do is bring them all togther in one file, when doing this the dwg reaches approx 12mb, reasonable not crazy I thought. (Using Autocad 2010). The problem is there will be alot of sheet in one drawing, which seems to slow everything down.

So I thought perhaps I could reference the entire combined drawing to a new file which just contains layouts for different sets. The drawing would just update itself and all you have to do is manage the layouts.

This has two problems for me, when I am doing layouts I like to go to each viewport and select object I dont want to see and VP freeze them. When its an xref I cannot do this.... I have to work out what layer the object is on and freeze though the long winded layer manager.

On top of this the xref forces new layer names which means I have to re do the freezing for all my existing layouts.

Sooo.. my current solution is to have two drawings, I draw in one and when I need to updat the other, I delete all, purge and paste in the new.

This is probably a bad description of what I hope to be a simple solution, but any comments or suggestions would be greatly welcome.

[Tom Beauford]

Options => System tab => "Cache model and last layout" might help if you have a lot of layouts. I seem to have better performance when everything is in one drawing, but my drawings are usually only about half that size.

The Layer Freeze command works on xreferences, change the settings to VpFreeze.

[BlackBox]

We keep each sheet in it's own drawing, and utilize Sheet Set Manager (SSM) for easy navigation between sheets. This also helps multiple users access the sheets needed, without conflict.