From the course: AutoCAD Civil 3D 2018 Essential Training

Application menu - AutoCAD Civil 3D Tutorial

From the course: AutoCAD Civil 3D 2018 Essential Training

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Application menu

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- [Instructor] AutoCAD Civil 3D is often referred to as a vertical application. The reason for that is because autoCAD Civil 3D is actually built on top of autoCAD Map. AutoCAD Map is built on top of autoCAD, and so there are vertical tools built within each application. So Civil 3D not only has all the capabilities of the Civil 3D software, but all the capabilities of autoCAD Map, and all the capabilities of autoCAD. And so there are a lot of similarities to the user interface of all three applications, autoCAD, autoCAD Map, and autoCAD Civil 3D. For example, the startup. When we start Civil 3D, and we have the startup page, it provides us recent documents and notifications, as well as it provides us the ability to start a new drawing and open existing files. We're going to focus, though, on the application menu. It's often referred to affectionately as the big A. If we go there from our startup, because no drawing is currently open or that we are showing active, it only provides us the tools that are application specific, new, open, recover, and so forth. But if we go to a open drawing, the application menu has many more tools and functions available to us. One that is often overlooked is found within the publish menu of the application menu. It's called eTransmit. As we mentioned before, Civil 3D is truly a tool that contains not just lines and arcs, but it also contains Civil 3D objects. Now, because these Civil 3D objects are custom and specific to Civil 3D, when we're sharing them outside our company to individuals who don't have Civil 3D, we have to consider that they might not even be able to see visually. We have to consider that they might not actually be able to properly view those Civil 3D objects. So with eTransmit, we can create transmittal setups that zip all the linked information. Xrefs, linked files, color table files, our plot settings, all of it. It'll zip it up, but we can also create a transmittal where it will save not only back to a previous version format, but also will take those special, unique Civil 3D objects, explode them into something that would be the basic geometry that autoCAD can view. Now, we don't want to explode the smart nature of Civil 3D objects within our working drawing, so having this transmittal set up ready to go provides us the ability to have the software do all of this in the background, zip it up, and get it ready to send or transmit to another user who may not have Civil 3D. So a lot of very powerful tools found here within the application menu.

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