Organizing drawings with AutoCAD - 5 Section

CHAPTER 25: RESOURCES IN DRAWINGS

25.1 Design Center

A logical extension of the last idea of ​​the previous chapter is that Autocad should have mechanisms to take advantage of everything already created in other drawings. That is, it was not necessary to create definitions of layers in each drawing, or text styles or type and line thickness. And while it is true that for that could be used drawing templates that already had these elements, that would be a limitation if in spite of that we could not take advantage of what exists in other files, like a newly created block. However, Autocad allows such use through the Design Center.
We can define the AutoCAD Design Center as an administrator of the objects in the drawings to be used in others. It does not serve in itself to edit them in any way, but to identify them and import them into the current drawing. To activate it, we can use the Adcenter command, or the corresponding button in the Palettes section of the View tab.
The Design Center consists of two areas or panels: the navigation panel and the content pane. The left panel should be very familiar to readers, is virtually identical to the Windows Explorer and serves to move between the various units and folders of the computer. The panel on the right, obviously, shows the contents of the folders or files that we chose in the panel on the left.

The interesting thing about the Design Center comes when we choose a file in the particular, since the panel of exploration shows branches of the objects susceptible of being taken to the current drawing. The panel on the right shows the list of objects themselves and, according to the view, until the preliminary presentation.
To bring an object to the current drawing, just select it with the mouse from the content panel and drag it to the drawing area. Whether it's layers, text styles or line styles, among others, will be created in the file. If they are blocks, then we can locate them with the mouse. So simple is to take advantage of the elements of a drawing in another with the Design Center.

With the Design Center, the idea is always to reuse elements and drawings or styles already created, without having to repeat them in each drawing or have to create complicated templates that we would have to feed with more and more elements.

Perhaps the only complication that the use of the Design Center may have is that we knew of the existence of some object - a block, for example - but we did not know in which file it is. That is, we knew the name of the block (or a part of it), but not the name of the file. In these cases we can use the Search button, which presents a dialog box where we can indicate the type of object desired, its name or part of it and will search within the drawings.

However, the use of this method can be very slow if we resort to it frequently. In these cases, the alternative is to use the Content Explorer, or, as it is defined in Autocad, the Content Explorer, to which we have to dedicate an additional section.