Trouble with units

[mid-awe]

Hi all,

We have to draw for imperial and metric. Our conversion for metric is 3.2808 - feet per meter. The issue is that whenever we draw metric we have to pull the calculator near and convert every measurement one at a time nearly doubling the amount of time it takes to draw our plan.

It seems that AutoCAD should be able to overcome this challenge. I have experimented with CVUNIT but that seems to take longer than crunching the numbers with the calculator.

I'm looking for suggestions and/or advice, (other than viewports; I'm working on that, but, we have near 40 templates to be changed to using viewports).

Thank you.

[Shneuph]

If you have measurements for your plan in feet and inches, set your units to Architectural and draw your entire plan (only the geometry no annotation).  When you're plan is entirely done it will be in feet and inches.  Inches will be the drawing units.  If you want the untis to be in meters you can scale by 1/12 to get feet then .3048 to get meters.  Then you can change your units to Decimal or whatever you like.  Now drawing units are meters.  Hopefully, this workflow helps.

[mid-awe]

Thank you, I'll give this a try for my next drawing. (in a few minutes)

[scot-65]

There has been a few times we need to send out in Metric format when all

our drawing files are created in Imperial. The following image helps to convert

one unit of measurement to another without altering the file as a whole to

that (new) unit of measurement. I caution that if you send out that file to

a user who is working in units other than what you are using, they will

quickly get confused...

The dimension style will have to be changed, SAVED, and not be set as overrides.

For those dimensions that did not convert, either redo them or command DIMSTYLE "Apply".

BEFORE converting, we usually add a suffix (via SaveAs) to the file name, indicating it is in another unit of measurement (Metric).

For revisions, we edit the original file and (re)convert. This way one can edit as usual and not get confused as well.