Organizing drawings with AutoCAD - 5 Section

25.2 Content Explorer

While it is true that we can search resources in all the drawing files within a folder or a disk drive with Design Center, so is the fact that these searches can be very slow, since they are based on inspection, file by file, the content to search. That is why we said at the end of the previous section that the alternative is to use the Content Explorer, or Content Explorer, since it is an application that searches and indexes all the contents of the drawing files of your computer, so that when making a specific search, the result is almost instantaneous. With the content browser we can find blocks, dimension styles, layers, line types, styles of tables and text, among other resources available in each drawing of Autocad that we accumulate. In addition, the Explorer remains active in the memory of your computer, working in the background, to keep the index of the objects always updated, as it detects if any file was added, deleted or modified from the indexed folders.
It also shows Autodesk online content, but that service is not available in all countries.
To activate this application, we must click the Browse button on the Extension Modules tab. It is important that you add the folders where you have your drawings.

It is important to note that it is not possible to add a drawing folder that is located on a removable disk drive, such as a USB drive or an external hard drive. In those cases we can still extract its elements to the current drawing with the Design Center.

25.3 Drawing aid

Let us now turn the matter in reverse. Suppose instead of using the Design Center, you had templates, as we suggested in the previous paragraph, with text styles, layers, dimension styles, blocks and infinity of other objects that you could or would not use in new drawings but that you preferred to have at hand just in case. If you have created multiple designs on such templates, you will most likely have unused objects in your drawing, which will affect the size of the file and, in complex projects, even the performance of the machine and the program they have to load he.
Autocad has a command that does the work inverse of the Design Center, that is, it detects the objects defined in a drawing but that are not being used so they can be easily deleted. The Help-drawing-Clean menu opens the corresponding dialog box for that task.

In that same menu, we can find other useful tools for handling the drawings, although strictly speaking they are not directly related to the use of the Design Center. Even so, it is important to consider them for working with Autocad, especially when there are problems.
The Review command, or the Review menu, crawls in a drawing file in search of faults. Its complement, of course, is the Recover command, which, obviously, should be applied to files that Autocad can not open, or that open with problems.
Finally, the Drawing Recovery Administrator menu opens a panel showing the backup copies of those drawings we were working on when a program or system failure occurred. In fact, you will see this panel when restarting Autocad after it has been closed due to an error. In the body of the administrator you can see the list of files that can be recovered and even a preview. It is likely that some untapped part of your work will be lost, but it will always be better to recover something from nothing.