From the course: AutoCAD P&ID Essential Training: User

Locating and opening your P&ID project - AutoCAD P&ID Tutorial

From the course: AutoCAD P&ID Essential Training: User

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Locating and opening your P&ID project

- [Instructor] Let's get started. I'm going to show you how to locate and open your P90 project. But first, I'll take a few moments to talk about two key files that reside in the project directory. When you open up your project for the first time or the program for the first, you'll see that it defaults. We have a default project here and this will always open. So, in order to open a project, we have to look for a Project xml file. So, we have to know where that Project xml file resides in order to populate this with the new project information. So, let's go out to Windows here. The default files are located in a very unusual place. So, let's go ahead and try and find those. Under C Windows, User, Username and you'll see here the next folder we need is AppData. But this AppData's grayed out and by default this is actually a hidden folder in Windows, so if you don't see that AppData folder, you can come up to View and you'll see here that there's a Hidden Items. Check that on and also just for simplicity we'll check on the File Name Extensions too. Once you have that, let's go ahead and open that folder. We'll go to our Roaming, Autodesk, into our P90 2017 folder, 21, enu and you'll see here we have our default project and we have a sample project. The project that we have open right now is our default, so let's take a look at these two files that we need to find. We have a Project xml file and approach symbol style drawing. Now, these two files are critical to your project. The Project xml file, that's the file we look for and actually load in Project Manager and that sets the path and the road map for all your database files and your drawing files. So, this is your roadmap file. And the other essential file is this project symbol style drawing. This is an AutoCAD drawing that contains all the blocks of all the symbols in your component library and your tool palettes. If you do actually open this drawing, you will see that it's blank, but if you do list the blocks in there, there is a lot of blocks and information in here. And the most important thing is never purge this file. If you purge everything out of this file, your project's not going to work, so that's two key important files. And the other thing that I want to point out is you can't rename these files. That name Project xml and then the project symbol style dwg those are hard coded into the software. So, if you want to rename that to include a project number or a client number, it's not going to be able to find that file, so it must be Project xml and it must be project symbol style dwg. So, I'm going to go back up here and we're going to look for the sample project and when I open the sample project you'll see that it's laid out the same way, This is the default out-of-the-box setup but you'll notice there's still that Project xml and there's the project symbol style drawing. So, to open this sample project, we're going to open this Project xml. So, let's go ahead back up here into our current project. I'm going to open, we're going to look for C, Users, Username, AppData, Roaming, Autodesk, P90, almost there, R21, enu, Sample Project, Sample Project and there it is, Project xml, so let's highlight that. Open and you'll notice that the sample project just changed here and if we expand on this P90, you'll see there's some files in here. So, now that we have the project open, we're ready to go ahead and edit some of these P90 drawings.

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