From the course: AutoCAD 2023 Essential Training

Comparing drawings with DWG Compare - AutoCAD Tutorial

From the course: AutoCAD 2023 Essential Training

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Comparing drawings with DWG Compare

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- [Instructor] We're starting another very short chapter in our AutoCAD essential training course. And what we're going to take a look at now is a couple of drawing management tools that you'll probably find really useful. They've been available in AutoCAD for the last few versions. So if you're using a much older version of AutoCAD, you probably won't have this particular functionality. So what we've got at the moment is a very, very simple drawing in front of us. It's called simpleobjects_001. You'll also notice that we've got a simpleobjects_002 open as well. Minus the hexagon. There's a reason for that. So make sure that you open up both drawings in AutoCAD. You need to download them from the library. You know the drill. Download both files from the library, pop 'em in the same folder and then open them both up in AutoCAD at the same time. So you should have simpleobjects_001. There's your file tab there. Simpleobjects_002. There's your file tab there. Now, when you've got both of the files open, what you want to do is make sure that simpleobjects_001 is the current drawing, not simpleobjects_002. You want the drawing with the hexagon in it. I hasten to add that one there. So you want 001 with our little pink hexagon right there like so. And what I'm going to show you is a lovely tool called DWG compare. It's on the collaborate tab in AutoCAD on the ribbon there. And there's DWG compare right there like so. And the DWG compare is incredibly useful. I'm going to click on DWG compare now. And what I want to do is I want to compare my 001 drawing, which I've got current here with the file tabs, against the 002 drawing. So you're pointing to the folder where both files are saved and you're selecting the 002 file. When I click on open, the screen changes and we're now in DWG compare. And what you've got is you've got this little sort of box here that's locked. It's a revision cloud but it's letting me know that that hexagon is obviously not in one of the drawings. So if I go to my settings here, not in current drawing, only in current drawing, draw order, cloud display, et cetera. So if you look at those settings at the moment you can see we've got a green hexagon which shows that it's only in the current drawing. If it was red, it wouldn't be in the current drawing. Anything that's gray, like the circle and the rectangle behind this little dialogue box are showing no differences. The rev cloud display that highlights the differences is currently rectangular. I could change that to polygonal. And what would happen there is that would actually take it around the hexagon slightly more. But what it's doing there you'll see is it's kind of going with the vertices of the hexagon. So it'll stay sort of rectangular if you see what I mean. So what I can do there is change that to polygonal like so. Maybe update the size, make it bigger, smaller, et cetera. I can also filter for things like hatch and text. So when I've come back in here, you can see it's still highlighting that like so. There's my rev cloud there. Now what I can also do is I can jump to that particular, obviously highlighted change in the drawings. If I click on the arrows, it'll zoom in on that. If I zoom back obviously, and go forward, there's only one. So I can't really do much else with the arrows. What I can also do is I can import objects from the compared drawing. So what'll happen there is I can import the hexagon into my drawing 002 if I wanted to. I can also generate an export snapshot drawing. So if I click on this, what'll happen is it'll give me comparison objects 001 versus simpleobjects_002.dwg file. And if I save that, that'll just save it in the folder where the drawings are right now. So I click on save and the background processing of the comparison snapshot drawing is ready to start. When I click on continue, what'll happen is that'll save that file. And there's my snapshot process in complete. I can open the drawing and as you can see there, it's zoomed in on that particular comparison. If I just double click on the wheel there you can see that I can zoom out and still use my zoom tools quite happily when I'm in the compare snapshot drawing. I can now click on the little cross there. That'll close that and I can close that particular snapshot drawing file. And do I want to save the changes to that? Well, I'll just say yes for now. That's fine. So we're back in our simpleobjects_002. And there's our simpleobjects_001 Still with DWG compare running so I can click on the green tick and close it. Double click on the wheel to zoom extends. Roll out a bit on the wheel and you can see we're back to our original three objects in the simpleobjects_001 drawing. And we've got the simpleobjects_002 drawing like we had at the start.

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