Sheets Happen! An introduction to the Sheet Set Manager

Whether you design manufactured parts, maps, or buildings, sheets happen! The sheet set functionality in AutoCAD enables you to efficiently create, manage, and share your entire set of sheets from one convenient location. At first glance, the powerful functionality offered by the Sheet Set Manager may seem overwhelming but you don’t have to learn and implement all of the functionality simultaneously.

Begin taking advantage of sheet set functionality for your current projects with minimal effort by importing your current drawing layouts into a sheet set. You can easily open drawings from a central location while you continue to edit them using traditional tools. Create new sheets using traditional tools and then import those sheets into your current sheet set. Easily plot, publish, archive or create an electronic transmittal of the entire set of drawings.

When you feel comfortable using the most basic sheet set functionality, you can begin assigning sheet set properties. Using sheet set properties, you can easily plot to any named page setup, regardless of the page setup that is saved in each of the drawing layouts. You can also assign your drawing template file to the sheet set making it easy for you to create new sheets directly from the sheet set manager.

Moving on to the most powerful sheet set functionality, using Fields, enables you to automate the sheet data that is stored in your drawings. You can create your own fields in the form of custom sheet set properties and then reference those, and other fields, in your plot stamps, callouts, view labels, and titleblocks.

Over the next few months, I will post a series of articles that enable you to progress through these various levels of implementation from the simplest to the most complex. If you spend only a few minutes a week, you can create a fully functional sheet set with minimum disruption to your current workflow.

The following diagram provides an overview of the topics I will be covering. If you aren't haven't seen a demo of sheet sets, you might want to review the Sheet Set videos under the AutoCAD Awareness post. Those videos were created in AutoCAD 2005 but they apply to AutoCAD 2006 as well.