Hello, we're going to take a look at external references in AutoCAD. And in this particular lesson, I'm going to start with AutoCAD's External References Palette. Now, before we get started what exactly is an external reference? Well, an external reference is a file that is attached to your current drawing as a reference, think of it as a background for your drawing. You can bring in other people's work, you can bring in other files and view them within your drawing. As they make changes to those other files that are referenced into your drawing you will see those changes as soon as they make the save and you reload those references. We're going to take a look at that in this chapter with external references in AutoCAD let's go ahead and get started. So on my screen, I have AutoCAD 2022 opened up and let's go ahead and open a drawing. So I'm gonna come over, click on open, And I'm going to choose the Existing Conditions Plan drawing that's in the parent folder which you should have from the exercise files. Go ahead and select this file. And you get a preview of the file. I'm gonna go ahead and say open here. And this drawing opens up just how I wanted it. I wanted you to get this error message about references not found. As this is something you will encounter throughout your career with AutoCAD. To link or to attach external references AutoCAD needs to know where to find those references. In this case AutoCAD cannot find the references and it's telling you one or more references could not be located or read, what would you like to do? Then it gives us the option to open the External References Palette which is what we're gonna look at in this lesson. Or you can ignore unresolved reference path. You and I are gonna explore this issue so we're going to open the External References Palette. Please take note this button down here to always ignore unresolved references. I advise you do not check this because you want to know when you open up a drawing that has references, that those references are missing. And that's what this dialogue box is giving you a warning. So we're gonna click on open the External Reference Palette button, and we're gonna look for the two references that are not found. So click here. And my External References Palette has displayed on my screen. Now the external references pallet is our organizer or manager for all reference files that are attached to your drawings. And from here we can attach, or we can have attachments from all of the different types of files. So we can have an attachment from other DWG files, which are AutoCAD files. We can attach image files. We can attach DWF files, micro stations DGN files. We can attach PDFs. You can have point clouds and you can have coordination models. If you're in AutoCAD LT. You will not see the point cloud or coordination model options. I'm gonna click away from here. Now, if you do not have the External References Palette displayed yet on your screen I'm gonna close out mine. There's a couple of ways you can get to it. So over here on the status bar when you have a drawing that has references attached to it you will have this button over here for Manage Xrefs. If I click on this button it's going to bring up the External References Palette. I'm gonna close out of the External References Palette Again. Another way to get to it is over here on the insert tab on our ribbon. We can come over here to the references panel and this button over here in the far right corner. If you click on this this will bring up the references pallet as well. Gonna close out of it, give you another method for accessing it. If you type out XR at the command line for external reference and press enter, that also is going to bring up your External References Palette. So there are several ways to get to this manager of your reference files. Now let's take a look further at this pallet. So in here we have our host drawing, which is the drawing we're currently in the Existing Conditions Plan. It's the same drawing name that we have here. And I know it's our host drawing because of the icon here and shows up across the top. This file, and this file is a reference attachment. And it says that it's not found, I'm going to expand this a little bit, Bring this up some. So for this reference file right here, it's not found it's saying found at it cannot and it does not see a path as to where it can find this file. So let's help locate this file. We can click over here in the saved path. We can come over here to this button on the far right. Click on it. And it allows me to browse to a location where this file can be found. I'm gonna browse up one folder and I'm gonna go to my Child folder And I'm going to come down and select that file. I'm gonna say open. And now that file has been loaded. You can see it show up across the back Do the same for this file here. I'm gonna select it except this time I'm gonna right click on it. And we're going to choose select new path, Which brings up the dialogue box. And we're gonna find this file here. The EX 61, which is this one here. And we're going to open it. And I've just now reloaded or reattached my two reference files that were not found. From the reference manager or this reference pallet. I can select the reference in here and it highlights letting me see the boundaries of that reference file. Select this one. And it highlights. I can also come over here to the file. I'll double click in this view port. And when I select the reference over here it highlights in the reference palette. Go ahead and hit Esc. Double click out here in paper space to come back in. If I did not want to see a reference file I wanted to unload it from memory, maybe because it's taking up space or I'm done referencing it for the moment, but I don't want to detach it. I can right click on this reference file and I can unload it. And the reference is removed from my visuals. It's still attached to the drawing, but it's no longer displayed. And you can do this for all of your references. Now unloaded is different from not found. Unloaded means I've just temporarily turned it off made it invisible the same as if it was a layer on or off, or freeze or thaw. If I was done I'm working with the reference file and I no longer needed it attached to my drawing. I can right click on it and say detach. When I wanna bring the drawing back for display I can right click on it and choose the reload button. I'm gonna reload this reference file. And it turns back on. Some more settings in the reference palette. This button here allows you to reload all of your references if you had a bunch of 'em that were unloaded. This is to refresh your display of your references. This is if you wanted to change the pathing for your files. So right now my path is a relative path. It's not an absolute path. An absolute path would be this one above it which is starting with my D drive, then the Child folder. And then the folder here. We'll learn more about absolute and relative pathing in later lessons. Over here is where you can change the view of your references, whether it's enlist view which is what we're looking at now, or tree view, go back to list view. And over here is where you can turn on or off the preview or choose detail view. Thanks for watching this lesson. Join me in the next lesson where we will take a look at attaching or overlaying reference files.
