Unnamed drawings

- [Instructor] We're starting a new chapter now, in this particular course, and we're going to start looking at external reference files in AutoCAD 2018. And you can see, at the top of the screen there, we've got a new drawing to use, which is ExternalReferences.dwg, and that will need to be obviously downloaded from the website so that you can use it to follow along with the videos in the chapter. Now, external reference files, or xrefs in AutoCAD, are drawings that are linked into your host drawing.

And what we're going to look at first, is the ability, in AutoCAD 2018, to link a reference file into what is known as an unnamed drawing. Let me show you what I mean. It's much, much easier to show you rather than talk to you about it. But previous versions of AutoCAD did not allow you to do this. If I go to the little plus sign here, in the tabs at the top of the screen, that will allow me to create a new drawing. So there's my new, blank drawing.

You can see it at the top of the screen there, Drawing2.dwg. That is an unnamed drawing because you haven't given it a file name, and AutoCAD has just given it a default file name. So what I want to do now, is I now want to reference in my ExternalReferences drawing here. So I'm going to reference that into Drawing2. So Drawing2, the unnamed drawing, will be the host drawing. So in the Insert tab on the ribbon, I go to the Reference panel and click on here, External References, and there's my Drawing2.

So that is my actual drawing, and you can tell that it's the host drawing 'cause it's got the little yellow and blue DWG icon there. I go up to the top of the panel at here, Attach DWG, and there's my ExternalReferences file there. And you can recognize it from what we looked at previously. I'm going to click on Open now, and what I'm going to do there, is I'm just going to use it as an attachment. Scale, I'll leave at one. Insertion point, I'll untick. It can just come in at zero, zero. I click on OK, and lo and behold, that comes in to an unnamed drawing.

You never used to be able to do this. Now, if I select that xref, the external references file, and look down here, at the bottom, can you see, if I just expand this a little bit, it's saying that it's Pending a Relative Path, which it is because it doesn't know where you're going to save that drawing to, that unnamed drawing to. So the whole idea is that AutoCAD 2018 now allows you to add external reference files to unnamed drawings.