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AutoCAD's interface is a multi- document environment. This means that we can
have multiple drawings open up at the same time. Opening multiple drawings can
be helpful, when making design comparisons or transferring a line work from one
drawing to another. Let's try and open a couple of drawings. I'm
going to do that by coming up and clicking the Open icon. We are going to look
inside the Exercise Files directory, inside the Chapter_2 folder and
I like to open these two drawings, the House Floor plan and the Kitchen Detail.
I can do that by clicking one drawing to highlight it, and then I'm going
to hold down my Shift key on my keyboard, and click the other drawing to select
them both, and then I'm going to come down and select Open, and AutoCAD
has opened both drawings in my interface. Now you may be wondering, where is the other
drawing. Let me show you how we can see it. I'm going to come up to the View
tab in my ribbon and click, and I'm going to over to the Window panel, this
is how I can jump or navigate between drawings. I have got a great big icon
here that says, Open Drawings, I'm going to click this guy. When I do AutoCAD
will give me a list of all of the drawings that are currently open. The
one with the check box is the guy that's current on my screen. If I want to
jump to the other drawing, I can select its name, and AutoCAD makes that drawing
current. Now what if I like to view more than one drawing
at a time? This comes in handy if I'd like to do a side by side comparison,
or if I'd like to move geometry from one drawing to another. That's what these
icons are for. I'm going to select this one, this one represents Tile
Vertically, it will give me a nice side-by-side view, of my two drawings. Now
if I'd like to work in a drawing, I will simply click in that model space environment,
and then I can roll my wheel back and forth to zoom. When I'll click in
this drawing, we'll roll back, so we can see the entire contents. Let's try and
use this side-by-side setup in a practical example.
Let's say I'm working in a Floor plan, for a single family home. Now I've got
the walls, and the doors in. I'm going through at this point of inserting
Furniture, let me zoom in on the Kitchen area. In my Kitchen, I've got a large
counter top with a small eating area and next to the eating area, I'd like to
place a couple of stools. Now rather than redrawing these stools from scratch,
I think to myself, you know what, a couple of weeks ago, I created a drawing
that was similar to this, where I drafted some stools. You know what, I'd like
to steal the stools from that drawing. Well, that happens to be the drawing
that I have opened over here. Let me click in this view to set this drawing
current, we'll pan over and we'll zoom in on these stools, and if I want to
move the geometry from one drawing to the other, what I'm going to do is, move up
and click on the geometry to highlight it, and then I'm going to place
my cursor on a highlighted edge. I'll click and hold, this copies the geometry to
my cursor, and then I'll just drag it, right it into the other file. At this
point I can release, and the stool is now a part of this drawing. When I'm finished,
I can close the original drawing. No, I'm not going to save changes,
and I'll maximize my Floor plan drawing. Now if I want to have more than one drawing
opened at a time, AutoCAD makes it easy for us to make design comparisons or
share content between our drawings.