- [Instructor] We're staying in our new office
proposal dot DWG file.
And the reason I've stayed
in this drawing is it's the host drawing
hosting the xref landscaping area.
Now what happens
if I want to edit the landscaping area drawing?
Well, there's one way of doing it.
You can just open it like so
and work on in AutoCAD as you would any other drawing.
If I jump back to the new office proposal, though
I can select the xref
and you'll notice on the external reference tab
up here on the ribbon
I can open the reference file that way as well
and it will open the external reference
in a separate window.
So I can edit it that way if I want to.
Now imagine I have clicked on open reference
and the landscaping area here is opened as a drawing file
and I want to make some changes to it.
So what I'm going to do
is I'm going to make a very simple change.
There's some hatching here
that represents some paving in the landscaping area.
I'm just going to select that like so
and I'm simply going to delete it.
So it's a right click and erase, like so.
So I've just got a little rectangle now
on the hard standing layer
that represents that hard standing.
Now, what I need to do is I need to save that drawing.
So I need to save it
in order for the updates to obviously occur
in the host drawing where the xref is hosted.
So if I click on save now, like so,
that'll save that drawing
and you'll notice the little asterisk
on the file tab disappears as well.
That little asterisk indicates that there's changes
in the drawing and it needs to be saved.
Here's the clever bit.
If I now go back to new office proposal here
I'll get prompted that an xref was modified.
So I now need to reload my landscaping area
the xref drawing into my host drawing.
Now you'll notice it says reload landscaping area
by P3650.
P3650 is just the name of my PC, just so you know.
And I can also can compare the changes
using what is called XREF Compare.
It's a new feature in AutoCAD.
So what we're going to do
is we're going to reload the landscaping area.
I'm not going to compare the changes though,
I'm just going to reload it.
XREF Compare is more of an intermediate
more advanced tool in AutoCAD
and it's not part of the AutoCAD essential training course.
So what I'll do there
is I'll just click reload landscaping area.
Can you see it reloads without the hatching?
That's how quick and easy it is.
I can also reload an xref
by going to the reference panel here
clicking on the little icon here,
external references.
I can also click down here
to load up the external references pallet.
If I want to reload any xref,
I can just right click and reload there as well.
And that will also reload it.
It tells me that the bottom on the command line, though
that the landscaping area dot DWG file hasn't changed.
We've already loaded the change.
So I can close the external references pallet,
and I've now got an updated xref drawing in my host drawing.