product focus
AutoCAD
2012
by: Brian Benton
Keys to Collaboration Success
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t’s very rare that any of us has to work in AutoCAD® by ourselves. Even solo designers have to deal with clients. Is there a right way to collaborate with others?
That’s a difficult question to answer because there are so many AutoCAD users and each one has his/her way of doing things. Those ways aren’t necessarily wrong, but they could be difficult to discern. Think about the times when you opened somebody else’s file and couldn’t figure out what the designer did. Now think about the times when somebody else opened your file and grumbled a few choice words about you under their breath! It’s happened, trust me.
What does it mean to collaborate?
Collaboration means different things. What it is and how you collaborate depends on what you are trying to accomplish. One definition I found for collaboration was, “To work, one with another.” To collaborate means working with another person. That’s the trick, working with other people on the same design project. AutoCAD allows only one person at a time to edit a file. That’s good. But how do users really work together? Each of our fellow collaborators must handle specific parts of the project. AutoCAD can help us with that. Perhaps one of the biggest collaboration tools are external file references. The Xref Manager is a tool that is used by most of us, but many are not using it to its fullest potential or at its best efficiency level. There are best practices when implementing reference files. If you are collaborating with other AutoCAD users on a project and aren’t using references then you are making things more difficult for yourself and the potential for errors is increased. Before you begin referencing data, make a plan. Stop thinking of AutoCAD files as drawings. While some of them are, files are actually different forms of data. That data is then placed into a drawing. The drawing is then annotated, plotted, and submitted.
Figure 1: Collaborating will be difficult if everyone does their own thing.
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Don’t put all of your data in one file. One big all-encompassing data file is bulky and inefficient. Create base files that contain specific data types (like site info in one file, building info in another, and so on) then reference that data into your drawing files. Reference files as an overlay instead of as an attachment. That keeps your data free to be seen but not forced upon other files. Once your data is divided up and organized, everyone can get exactly what they need when they need it. It also means that when the data is updated, everyone who needs that data is also updated. Don’t copy and paste data into your drawing file. That changes it from a drawing file to a data file. Keep your base file names the same. When they are revised, copy them and rename the old file. August 2011