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Microsoft Visio 2010 : Importing Graphics (part 5) - Importing AutoCAD Drawings - Inserting an AutoCAD File

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3/4/2014 1:17:18 AM

5. Importing AutoCAD Drawings

Visio is a great tool that touches many different disciplines. It’s no replacement for CAD, but it does work great with CAD. One typical example is with floor plans and office layouts. A CAD program like AutoCAD is better at creating precise drawings of a building’s shell and structure—the walls, support pillars, doors, windows, and so on.

When it comes to arranging furniture, cubicle walls, fixtures, computer equipment, and personnel shapes in a drawing, however, Visio excels. Such tasks are probably a poor use of a CAD professional’s time anyway, and any Visio user can drop couches and chairs onto a page and arrange them!

AutoCAD is expensive and has a steep learning curve, whereas Visio is cheaper and easier to learn. As a result, an interesting symbiosis has evolved where CAD and Visio users can work together. The makers of Visio used to talk about CAD adjacency, which I think is a great term to describe Visio’s relationship with CAD.

In this scenario, Visio users can open AutoCAD files, mark them up with ideas, add furniture, equipment, and other shapes to them, then export the result back to AutoCAD format. The engineering department can continue working within AutoCAD but benefit from the additions made by the Visio users.

With Visio 2010, you can import and save CAD files from AutoCAD 2008. You can control the visibility of CAD layers as well as change their colors. Plus, you can snap to objects in the imported CAD object. And this can all be done without converting the object to Visio vectors, although that is an option, too.

Inserting an AutoCAD File
1.
Start a new Office Layout drawing from the Maps and Floorplans template category.

2.
On the Insert tab, click CAD Drawing. The Insert AutoCAD Drawing dialog appears. Note that the file filter is pre-set to AutoCAD Drawing (*.dwg;*.dxf) in the lower-right corner of the dialog.

3.
Your Visio 2010 installation should have a sample AutoCAD file handy, located in this directory:

C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office14\Visio Content\1033

(The last number in the path might be different if you are using a language version other than U.S. English. Browse to this folder.)

4.
The file BLDGPLAN.DWG appears in the dialog. Select it and click Open.

5.
The CAD Drawing Properties dialog appears, as shown in Figure 6.

Figure 6. Inserting an AutoCAD file into a Visio drawing.

6.
Set the CAD Drawing Units to Feet. AutoCAD drawings don’t specify which units the drawings are in, so unfortunately you have to know this information in advance. If you don’t know, try asking the file’s creator. You can also use trial and error; the usual suspects are inches, feet, millimeters, and meters. If one doesn’t work, try another.

7.
In the dialog, notice the preview area on the right. It shows that the CAD Drawing is much larger than the page as a result of choosing Feet for the drawing units. This is similar to the Page Setup dialog’s preview that shows the relationship between printer paper and drawing paper.

It looks as though you should adjust the drawing scale here to get the CAD drawing to fit on the page. But don’t change any settings here because they don’t work. You’ll fix the drawing scale in a minute. Just click OK for now.

8.
The building plan is now inserted into your drawing, and it is much larger than the drawing page. Try zooming out to see the whole plan.

9.
Click on the building plan object. Notice that it has gray resize handles indicating it is locked against resizing. Notice also that it can’t be moved or deleted either.

10.
With the CAD object selected, check the size of the object by looking at the status bar. The CAD object is 98ft 9in × 99ft. This size seems reasonable for this office plan, so we just need to change the scale so that it fits the drawing page.

11.
Change the drawing scale. Right-click on the page tab and choose Page Setup. On the Drawing Scale tab, choose a Civil Engineering scale of 1″ = 20″ 0″ and then click OK. The drawing scale changes, and the page is now big enough for the CAD object. However, the office plan object is now off-center.

12.
Right-click the CAD object and choose CAD Drawing Object, Properties to bring up the CAD Drawing Properties dialog again. Alternatively, you can just double-click the CAD object.

13.
Uncheck Lock Size and Position; then click OK.

14.
Move the CAD object to the center of the drawing page. Because it is important that the CAD object not accidentally be resized, revisit the dialog and relock the object’s size and position.

15.
Hold on to this drawing. We’ll continue working on it in the next exercise.
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