About Importing the Drafting Standard (AutoCAD Mechanical Toolset)

There are several scenarios where you may want to import the drafting standard settings of one drawing into another.

For example:

• You receive a drawing from a client. You want to convert that drawing to your company standard before working on it.
• Your company revises the company standards template after you have started work on the current drawing. You now want to update the current drawing to the latest company standard.
• You make some useful changes to the settings of the drafting standard on the drawing you are working on. You want to propagate the changes across the company by updating the company standards template. Examples of such changes are:
  • You update the symbol libraries for some symbols.
  • You add a complex formula to a component property in the BOM.
• You need to use some surface texture symbol preset lists (or note templates or symbol libraries) in the current drawing which reside in another drawing or template.

Use the AMSETUPDWG command to import the drafting standard from a template (a.dwt file) into the current drawing. AMSETUPDWG provides the ability to:

• Import all standards from a drawing template.
• Import only selected standards (rather than all standards in a drawing template)
• Import any of the following without importing anything else:
  • Symbol libraries
  • Note templates
  • Surface texture edit lists
• Review the changes to the current drawing before they are committed and save the report to Microsoft Excel
• Save an import configuration for later use.

In most cases, objects controlled by the drafting standard react to a change in settings in the middle of a drawing session. Hole charts and title blocks are known exceptions to this rule. Sometimes other objects do not react to changes in settings, under special circumstances; typically due to the net effects of a combination of changes usually involving a change in the current drafting standard and the Object/Layer settings.

Note:

Before you import settings from a DWG file, you must save it as a DWT file. This is because AMSETUPDWG does not support import from DWG files.