New to AutoCAD, quick question about isolation sections of a land development

[Anonymous]

Hey guys,

This is my first post and for a quick bit of what I'm doing any why I've joined, I'm new to AutoCAD and need to pick it up quick for my job. I work at a small engineering firm that is well aware that I have minimal AutoCAD experience. My background is in Rhino3d and AutoCAD has never been something I needed to learn until now. My obstacle is the new vocabulary and interface. It controls relatively differently, but all and all it translates well. With the new position, I've been appointed to juggle learning AutoCAD from scratch (videos, tutorials, books), along with still getting some of the small requests completed. Therefore I'll have some questions "outside of the curriculum", if you will, while I'm picking up the new software.

Anyhow for my question:

I've been given a residential subdivision plot. It has all already been drawn in 2d, including all of the information and the grading, ect. All I need to be able to do, is isolate individual house plots, including all of the lines for the grading and what not. I have the drawing of the entire subdivision if many house plots. For example, what I imagine doing in my head, is highlighting plot "11" (for example) and cutting it out of the entire drawing. I need to individualize each house foot print, with all included grading information, and get them to scale, for individual print outs.

It's a very easy task, and something I could manage in just a few seconds on Rhino. AutoCAD doesn't really use the same "selecting" and "trimming" type of functions, and I'm at a loss for ideas of which commands could do it for me. Basically, I'd like to just take a rectangle, and extract everything inside of that rectangle into it's own drawing.

Any quick ways to achieve that?

Thanks,
Dan

[Anonymous · Accepted solution]

you can window an area and copy/paste into a new drawing.

The other option would be to create a layout and use a viewport to print the area.

[Anonymous]

Thanks for your input. Upon playing around with it all day so far, I had figured out the viewport option in the layout. That is exactly what I needed to do, to isolate the individual lots on a print.

-Dan

[neilyj666]

And you can then copy the layout, rename it and window to a new area and do this as many times as required. You can also control object visibility on a per viewport basis.