I am curious to know how other people organize their drawings within projects. I work at a very small company where I do most of the design work, as well as just about all of the CAD work and I have yet to figure out the best way to set up my drawings. I have never had the benefit of working at a company with any kind of standards in place so I’ve gone through a lot of trial and error over that last couple years. I’ve reached a point where I realize that I need a more efficient structure to my drawings, so I’m turning to all of you.
What I want to know is how you split your drawings up (base survey in one file, grading plan in another, pipes in another, etc) and when to use xrefs. Right now, I typically xref the existing survey into some design drawings, but I think I could be making greater use of xrefs as a whole.
The thing that has driven me nuts with xrefs is when i have an xref in a drawing and need to turn some of its layers off since I don’t always remember what stuff was on which layer. Lets say that I have Drawing 1 xref-ed into Drawing 2: I find myself having to open up Drawing 1, clicking on things to find out their layer, writing this down, then going back into Drawing 2 and turning these layers off. It’s a hassle and it’s a reason that many times I try to avoid xrefs. Am I missing an easier way of doing things?
I know I touched on a lot of topics here, but I appreciate your insight on anything I brought up.
PS. in case this matters: we don’t use Vault (maybe someday when our company grows and we have more users…) but I use data shortcuts as needed.