Sharing between files

[Solar-emc]

Why is it so hard to share things between autocad files. I make a block in one file and it's not available in and other. I make a take the time to format a Table and can't find it in another file. Isn't that the point of making part to reuse? Even cutting and pasting between files is has issues.

[Anonymous · Accepted solution]

If you use the Design Center palette, you can transfer block, table styles, text styles etc from one drawing to another. Command ADCENTER or it's also on the Insert tab on the ribbon. 

Help page for Design Center

If you always want the text styles/block etc to be in your drawings, add them to your template file (save as .dwt) and start every drawing from the same template file. You can also set up your title block, page setups, print settings, default scales in your template file so it's useful to do.

 You can also set up a palette to grab the block from if they are always the same standard blocks - see this article

[Solar-emc]

it, must be a environment variable thing. But why wouldn't just be setup to a default dir. In other programs you make a tool, save it and every file/document new or old can see that tool.

[Solar-emc]

marianne.mcdonald thanks ever so much, I'll give it a try and report back and mark your reply as a solution, thanks agian

[Anonymous]

AutoCAD is used for many different disciplines. Blocks and styles used for highways drawings would be very different to ones used for electrical drawings, for instance. Therefore AutoCAD lets you define styles for text, dimensions, tables etc. If you create styles called "Yourcompany_dim" or "Yourcompany_table", then you can easily import the styles from one drawing to another. if what you are doing is altering the Standard style, you can't import it as Standard style is already defined by default in the base autocad template.

[dgorsman]

AutoCAD is very flexible, with a number of different customization options.  You can call the INSERT command with a block name and no path.  If the block is not already defined, AutoCAD will resort to searching through the folders in the support file search path (SFSP) to find it.  With some forethought and organization, block definitions can be stored in an orderly manner while still being easily accessible.  Because the SFSP is unique to each AutoCAD profile, different profiles can be used to control where blocks are being searched for ("Highways" profile, or "Electrical" profile).

With a bit more work, block selection and insertion can be handled by customization through menu macros, scripts, or programming using LISP or managed dotNET in C# or VB.