Location issues NWD vs. NWF in Manage

[L-Town]

Hello,

I'm a novice with Navisworks, having no training of any sort, so if this is a dumb question, I apologize ahead of time.

 I have an overall site model of a water treatment plant in individual AutoCAD and bentley autoplant .dwg files system by system and structure by structure and so on.  I have an overall site CAD.dwg file that consists of all these XREFd into one.

I have opened Navisworks Manage 2012 - opened up that particular overall site cad file, and saved it as an NWF.

As I progress through the job I save weekly versions of the overall site as Site Current_verrsion#.NWD so I can email them to the field engineers to review in freedom.  It works great. 

Now that the job is nearing completion - I was atttempting to append an OLDER .nwd file into the CURRENT .nwf, to show the changes we've made in the design to the owner, however, when I append the older file, It is in a drasticly different location miles away on the screen, not overlapped like I'm trying to see.

It's an NWD of the SAME NWF file, why would it move? and can i move it back? Or what have I done wrong?

Thank you for any help.  Much appreciated.

[Patrick_Aps_9121]

Units are indeed a tricky thing in both AutoCAD and Navisworks.

Perhaps you can do the following:

Create a second NWD of the situation today.

Begin a new file.

append only NWD files files of the different status of the project, not the NWF or the DWG.

See if they appear on the same location.

In general, I never use an overal DWG. That is the purpose of an overal nwf, that is used to create the NWD each week.

[L-Town]

That worked.  Thank you.
I just began with last weeks NWD, instead of the current NWF.

I have been using an overall NWF to cut the weekly NWD files, yes.
I have discontinued the overall DWG, the original purpose of which was for field measurements by field engineers in AutoCAD, due to file sizes becoming an issue.   

Is there a solution to pull measurments in the freedom program for my field engineers, instead of continually sending them revised versions for hundreds of individual building and piping XREF files?

[Patrick_Aps_9121]

I do not understand completely what you mean with "pull measurements in Freedom" but are you aware that since the release of Freedom 2012 you can use the measure tools in Freedom ?

What I do is having a fileserver where "the Daily" nwd is located. Only the server can write to that location, all project members have read access and can use their Freedom to look at the most recent model.

On a computer a script is sceduled to create the NWD overnight from the "overall NWF"

If people need extra viewpoints or extra models appended to the NWD, I modify the overall NWD.

So i don't send models around any more,

I just send links to the location of the Daily model.