AutoCAD: Tips & Tricks

- [Instructor] Welcome to another AutoCAD tip and trick for today. And we're going to have a look at the Drawing Compare command, the new Drawing Compare command in AutoCAD. And just so you know, it is an AutoCAD 2019 specific command. Older versions of AutoCAD don't have it. Just be aware of that. But we've got two drawings open that you can download from the library. DWG Compare 001 and DWG Compare 002. Make sure you've got both of them downloaded and open in AutoCAD to follow along with this particular tip and trick.

Now, what we're going to look at is the results and how we manage those results with the Drawing Compare command. Now, you may have already seen my previous tip and trick about how to use the AutoCAD Drawing Compare command. So I'm not going to dwell on that. I'm just going to quickly do a drawing compare now of these two drawings. So, I go to the View tab on the ribbon, I go to Drawing Compare here on the end of the ribbon, and basically I select the drawings that I want to compare. So there's Drawing Compare 001 and Drawing Compare 002, then I hit the Compare button.

Now, as soon as I do that, AutoCAD creates this new drawing to show me the comparison results between the two drawings. So you'll notice there highlighted in green, that there was information on the DWG Compare 002 drawing that wasn't on the DWG Compare 001 drawing. Check the comparison panel at the top in the Compare tab on the ribbon. So DWG Compare 002 is green. There's our green highlighted results. Zoom in on those results now and just maybe pan up a little bit as well.

And you'll notice there's a nice little revision cloud around each of those green highlighted results. Now the good thing is you can go to the Change Set panel here on the Compare tab on the ribbon. And I can switch off those revision clouds if I want to, like so. I don't have to have them, it just comes up by default. So I can switch that off if I want to, which does sometimes clarify the drawing a little bit. But the best bit is, is I can go through all of the change sets. So at the moment, I'm just zoomed in.

Let's switch on the revision cloud again. And you can increase the margins of the revision clouds if you want to. You'll notice you can make them bigger and smaller. And you'll also notice that I can change them to polygonal if I want to so they follow the shapes of the objects with the sets, the comparison data sets that you've got there when you've done the Drawing Compare command. But what I can do is use these arrows here, which is really cool. And I can look at each individual change set as I go through. So there's the results and I'm looking at all the comparison results there, one by one, working through, clicking on the arrows.

How cools is that? It's really useful. And what I can do there now is I can just double-click on the wheel to zoom extents on the mouse, and I'm back to my full drawing. And that's how quick and easy it is to work with your results when you're working with the Drawing Compare command in AutoCAD.