There are lots of ways to open a drawing and sometimes you may not think of the quickest way right away. Here’s my list:
- The OPEN command. This is the obvious one, of course. Click the Open button on the Standard toolbar. (In 2009, click Open on the Quick Start toolbar.) Or type open on the command line.
- From the DesignCenter. Press Ctrl+2 to open the DesignCenter. In the left, navigation pane, navigate to the folder containing the drawing and select it. Then find the drawing in the Content pane on the right, right-click it, and choose Open in Application Window.
- From the Sheet Set Manager. With a sheet set open in the Sheet Set Manager, on the Sheet List tab, double-click the name of the drawing (or right-click and choose Open).
- Double-click it in Windows Explorer. As with any Windows file, you can double-click it in Windows Explorer to open it in AutoCAD. If AutoCAD isn’t open, Windows will start it for you.
- Drag from Windows Explorer to the command line window. This is a little-known tip. Drag a file from Windows Explorer to the command line window. If you drag to the drawing area instead, you insert the file as a block.
- From a script. Just use OPEN in your script, add a space, and enter the name of the file. (See Tutorial: Automate tasks with a script file for instructions on creating a script.) Be sure to use the entire path if it isn’t in the support file search path. Enclose the file name (and path, if any) in quotation marks if there are spaces in the name. For example:
open “c:\drawings\3a 297.dwg”
Tannar Frampton contributed another way to open a drawing. He says, “You can open drawings via the XREF Manager by right-clicking and selecting ‘Open.’ This way, you do not have to search for the file.”
Ellen Finkelstein is the author of the best-selling AutoCAD & AutoCAD LT Bible, which started with R14. Ellen has written extensively on AutoCAD, including articles for Autodesk’s website and features for AutoCAD’s Help system. Ellen’s first book was AutoCAD For Dummies Quick Reference.
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The reference at the bottom about opening drawings out of the Xref Mgr is misleading. The drawing would have to be previously xref’d into the drawing to open it this way. That being said, I have used this many times to repair or edit the xref so it would display things the way I neede them.
What about if the program prompts you to type the location, but you want to select the location in a pop up window. Is there a command to change the prompt from typing in the command line to selecting in a pop up window? I’ve used “filedia” before, but I that’s not working on my new computer.