AutoCAD 2011 - Changing X-ref Paths

by Stuart Tanfield

Having worked a couple of days on support last week, I noticed that more and more calls seem to be cropping up with AutoCAD. Not the sort of questions on how to draw lines, but more along the lines of pushing the software to its limits. These questions have had various outcomes.

One of the questions though that I found particularly interesting, was the question on changing x-ref paths. One of our customers wanted to change a number of x-ref paths from Full to Relative. They didn't want to have to open every drawing and go and change this option as they had in excess of 50 drawings to modify. There is a neat tool to do this for us in AutoCAD, but it's a tool that not a lot of people know about. It's the Reference Manager tool. It was introduced to AutoCAD way back in 2004. It can be located at Windows Start Menu > Programs > Autodesk > AutoCAD 200X > Reference Manager.

The reference manager works outside of AutoCAD so you can change multiple drawing references without even opening a single drawing. Not only does this allow you to change the paths of x-references, but it also allows you to re-path fonts, images & plot configurations.

Give it a go and I'm sure you'll be surprised with this little bonus feature!!!