I really appreciate your taking time to instruct new users.
If I am understanding projects it is a different way of managing layouts than keeping them all in one drawing. It sounds like if I start with a project and use the projects window to add layouts I get each one as its own dwg file. If this is so how can I have two layouts that are different views of the same model?
The workflow I have in mind is to have all the layouts for a job in one dwg file since all of them that have viewports are viewing the same model. I created a project for a job when I learned that user properties could only be defined in projects not in drawings that were not members of projects.
At the moment I am using the folowing workflow which seems to work.
1) To start a new job I copy the drawing of an existing project using finder and give it a new name.
2) I use the + button in Project Manager to create a new project using the project associated with the drawing as the template.
3) I use the + button to add existing drawing to the new project and select the copy of the old project drawing.
This seems to work although if there is a better way of managing projects I would like to know.
What is concerning me is that having done the above somtimes I can select a layout from the open command on the list of layouts in Project Manager (i.e. by double clicking on it) but somtimes I cannot and must use the list of layouts that drops down from the status bar to switch between layouts. I don't know if this is a bug or I am tripping some state where this does not work. This is what I meant be a project and drawing being partialy connected.
There are two other things that happen somtimes that might be bugs or might be me not unerstanding options:
1) Somtimes when I open a layout on a project the first time after starting Autocad the Project Manager disapears. The window menu still shows it clicked and command-8 will not bring it back. The only way to see the Project Manager again is to open it from the file menu.
2) Sometimes when I start Autocad the windows that were checked do not come back, I thought Autocad remembered what was open when it was last closed.
Thanks again!