Professional Tips and Techniques Using the Sheet Set Manager in AutoCAD

Hello and welcome to Autodesk University. This class is titled Professional Tips and Techniques using the Sheet Set Manager in AutoCAD. My name is Sam Lucido. I am a design systems administrator with CHA Consultants. I handle all the back-end programming, the customization, the profiles, and all of the handling of the Autodesk products.

I've been using AutoCAD since the early 1990s. I'm a Civil 3D and Map 3D user since about 2007 and many other different CAD software programs. I'm a technical writer for AUGIWorld and a former AUGI Board of Directors member. I encourage each and every one of you to join that group and check them out at AUGI.com.

I'm AutoCAD Civil 3D certified professional, and I'm an Autodesk expert elite member. I'm the owner of a blog named CADprotips.com where I dish out tips and tricks to the community about once a month and keep up with everything current within the industry. And I always believe if I can teach you one thing and make you think about it, then I've done my job. And what we want to do here is even if you know 90% of the material, if there's that 10% gray area, if I can teach you one new thing, you can expand upon it and become more proficient with the software.

So the summary of this class, this is the final installment of my Sheet Set Series. We've done it in the lab. We've done the lecture. Now we're going to do sort of a tips and techniques section on Sheet Sets and everything that we've learned over the years. So we're going to go live in the program, and then we're going to cover some of the hidden powers behind it, and finally, most importantly, bring back value and the knowledge to help you excel. Those are my objectives here for this class.

So our learning objectives, we have four of those. The first learning objective is to identify ways to create several templates for different disciplines. On the slide, you see a Civil example sheet, but we're going to cover different ways how to do architectural and mechanical and maybe even structural, some other ones.

And then we want to expand our knowledge of the Sheet Set Manager with lesser known tips and tricks-- Publishcollate, setting it to 1 or 0, what does that do, resources, sorting fields, the Model Space Tab, should I set that? SSMPolltime, do you really need to refresh your Sheet Set Manager every 60 seconds? The non-breaking space, the ALT0160, and the SSMAutoOpen. And finally, we're going to cover the e-books that are out there. Within the data set, you'll find there's a reference material folder that has the Mastering AutoCAD Sheet Sets e-book and a complete guide to the Sheet Set Manager.

Our third tip is use the power of fields to populate and customize common data. We cannot talk about the SSM without talking about fields and how to connect the data together. And then finally, we're going to talk about system variables and how they can affect your Sheet Set performance, the SSFOUND, SSLOCATE, SSMPolltime as I spoke about. So that being said, let's get started. We'll move over to AutoCAD, and we'll start populating our data in the sheet sets.

The first thing I'd like to talk about are the three separate guides. So this is Mastering AutoCAD Sheet Sets, and this along with the complete guide of the Sheet Set Manager last year and this handout, that gives you almost 300 pages of material to review. I encourage each and every one of you to look at all these documents and review that.

So the first thing I want to do in AutoCAD is we're going to start a new drawing, and we're going to actually close out of here really quick and set a profile. And what the profile is going to do, it's going to give us the ability to navigate through our exercises. So this is our first tip. Under the Option tab, Profiles, you'll see we have AU2021SSM. You're going to select Import. You're going to go out to this profile folder. Now, you're going to have to go to See Data Sets underneath the class name, Project Data, Profile, select that, import it, and then set it to current.

And the first thing you're going to notice is this area down here will turn to that sort of a dark red color. But what that gives us is the ability when I select Open to have all of these sections easily ready for us to view. And another tip, which we'll cover probably in the Q&A, is how did I get this area gray in the back. It's not a Sheet Set Manager thing, but it's a Windows thing, and we can cover that as well.

So we covered the profile. Now you're ready. Now we need to look at some of the examples that Autodesk provides us. You can see under here there's architectural, civil, and mechanical in the Exercise 1 folder. So what we're going to do is we're going to open them up and just kind of view what's going on. So Application menu, Sheet Set.

So there's different ways-- the application menu Sheet Set, Control-4, Sheet Set Manager, the menu bar I spoke about, if I turn that off, if I set that to zero, it's off. If I set it to one, it's on. I can do File, New Sheet Set. We're just going to simply use the palette. We'll probably live in the palette for this one.

So we're going to Open Sheet Set. We're going to go to the Exercise 1 folder. And we're going to take a look at some of these architectural, civil, and mechanical. And you see this is our goal. We are going to create these three sheet sets for different disciplines. They're already created in the section for you to use, but I'll show you some of the examples in here.

So I'm going to open up RD-Addition, and you'll see with that SSM auto open variable set to 1, it'll automatically open the sheet set. I'm going to double click my sheet, and what I like to do is look at the examples and look at the properties. What you'll see here in the sheet set, you'll see the project control data has not been filled. This is common data that will remain within your sheet set. It can't be deleted. Here's custom data, and you can see they added periods here, not the non-breaking space which we'll cover. And then here's our sheet set custom properties that this person used.

So we'll open up another one and check out what that one is. So I'm going to go Application Menu, Open Sheet Set, and I'm going to open say the mechanical or manufacturing sheet set. Again, I'm going to double click. I'm still in this drawing, T101, so I'm going to get out of there, and I'm just going to double click the cover sheet of the manufacturing one. And you can see this one's a little different.

But the real power behind the Sheet Set Manager is the ability to navigate through all these drawings very quickly. But again, we're going to look at the properties again. This is the DST file. Those three files I showed you, DST. This one doesn't have any custom data. It only has project name, project number, and milestones. So the only thing this one really does is it connects the fields. When you see the grayed-out area, that means it's connected to something.

So what we're going to do now is actually look at the properties. How do we contain that? So we're going to jump over to the Exercise 3 folder. I'm going to close out of my sheet sets, close out of here. So that's how you create a generic sheet set. You just do right here, New Sheet Set, Example. And like I said, Autodesk provides us with three. So say we started with Civil Imperial, Next, and then this is the DST file name. So that'll be what you name your sheet set. You can create hierarchy, subsets, and things like that and place it within your sheet set folder.

But we're going to open up one that's already done in the Exercise 3 folder. You'll see this is a title block, and this is what I like to do is you take our title block, our company title block, you set your fonts and set everything the way you want it so when you connect the fields, it retains the value of your font. So that's what the first thing we're going to do. You take your title blocks, which are in the start folder. You see there's three separate ones, and we're going to open all three of these just to show you the difference between the external references and the sheet set.

So we started out with a template. You could probably have [INAUDIBLE] whatever it is. This is our template, which contains attributed data. If I type ATE selecting my template, I can see that all of these, some are multi-line attributes, some are regular attributes.

And then if I go over-- if you're an XREF person, you can see that this drawing has line work. There are no fields that can be connected in the Sheet Set Manager because it has to be on the sheet. This is the sheet. If you XREF this in and have the data in there, it's not going to show up. So you need to have a secondary one for the sheet, which would be the data there.

So that explains how you get started with that. It's a process. You have to determine what your company standard is. I've actually done it both ways at a company where some people XREF and some people did it with a template. In both cases, I noticed that you need an XREF one way or the other. In this one, it's either to populate subcontractor data or something within the title box. So you're going to need one XREF. Depending on whether you use fields or not is up to you.

So let's go to exercise 5. We're going to jump a little bit, and we're going to talk about how to add sheet custom fields and sheet set custom fields. So I'm going to close out of my template. I'm actually going to close out of my drawing here and close out of the sheet set and open up the one in the Exercise 5 folder.

I'm skipping around, but in the handout, what you're going to see in the handout is you're going to see all these exercises. They're separate lessons as it was done last year, and each tip is highlighted, and they're tip 1 all the way up to 52. So we're going to go here and open this real quick, and you'll see there's nothing in here. There's not even a drawing in there yet.

So we're going to open up a drawing in the Exercise 5 folder. And what we want to do, this is how we connect the data together. I'm going to take this drawing, Import Layout as Sheet. I can do it this way. Another tip, I can right click here and import the layout as sheet. Anyway I do it, browse for the drawings, Exercise 5, this is my drawing file. It's not part of the sheet set yet. The warning I'm getting because I've done this several times during the data set, you can ignore that right now.

So you can see I have my see C100, which is in here, my AU project, my properties. Some of this data's already Populated I'm going to show you how to do this. And then here's our project control data, the project number, project name, project phase, and the milestone, the date. Whatever you decide to use with that, that's up to your company standard or what you feel best. Sheet custom properties are properties that are controlled by the sheet only, the current sheet, not the sheet set, and then sheet set custom properties.

So you can see, once I added this in here, I haven't populated it yet. We're going to do that right now. We're going to connect them. So how do we do that? So if I right click Properties, say we wanted to insert another field. Say we want a Design By. So I'm going to Edit Custom Properties. One, two, I'm going to add one. I'm going to add a sheet custom property. I'm going to call it 03 Designed By.

And the value, I can leave this at value, but that will print. If I delete this and put it blank, you're going to get four dashes, and that'll print as well. So we want to use what I said before, the ALT0160 or %% or %%U. So if I do ALT0160 on my keyboard, you can see it jumped. I select OK, select OK, and I've got 03 Designed By.

And I know it worked because of the blank space there. And the same thing down here. And the reason for the numbering sequence, the Sheet Set Manager populates data alphabetically. So putting 01, 02, 03, 04, you have to be really organized. That's why it's good to have your title block here and then be consistent, your drawing name 1, 2, 1, 2, 3 as you go down the list.

Now, how do we connect the two together to actually share the data? These two right now have a relationship, but we want to populate it with our current project data and then save it to our current project for a template. So how do we do that? We've got everything in here, and there was a test one down there. So the Edit Custom Properties, how do I get rid of that? Select that, delete that.

So we actually have revisions A, B, and C which will be right up in here, 7 A, B, and C. We have a drawing scale. We have a sheet total, project number, project title second line, project title first and third. I've left this in here to show you how it sorts, how you have to stay organized. There's nothing more I can do. I can delete it and type project title third, and it would go behind it. So let's do that real quick, 04 project title third. And then this for the sheet set, ALT0160. OK and OK, and you can see-- well, go out here, right click, Properties-- how it sorts it 1, 2, 3. So that's how you can get around it.

Now, I couldn't change the number. The one thing that you can't do and you can see how I mean being organized. Say you get this all done, and you do realize you need a third sheet or third line for the project. You can't move these up and down. In a great world, it would be-- if I used Batman up in here, all these attributes, you can move things up and down to get them the way you want them in your title block here. You can't do that with the Sheet Set Manager. So it's very important to stay organized up front to do that.

So let's connect these two together. Let's take that title block, that DST file, and connect them together. So I'm going to type AT here, double click on my title block, and you can see the first thing I want to do we have a project title, which is down underneath here. I'm going to drag it, right click, and hit Insert Field, and it's current sheet set custom. And you see drawing name first. We're at the project level, though, down here so it's project title 1.

We'll do three, project title 1, Insert Field, project title 2, second, and you see that, there's your blank space. I'm going to delete this. You don't necessarily need the text. The text is there to hold the value. Insert Field, project name 3 third. And we go through our entire sheet set, and we create all these different fields that are connected from over here to here.

Now, Drawing Scale, Insert Field. Drawing Scale would be under here as well. Let's cover the sheet number and sheet total, Insert Field. Sheet Total, which I'm surprised is not in the actual project control data because you always have total sheet sets, and then the milestone, which actually would be underneath here, that would be project control data. So Insert Field, project milestone, and you can see everything's populated.

I want to talk about the current sheet name, which is here. So we've got everything we need, which there's more data that you can add. So C100-- so what some people do-- this is actually my layout tab name. It's actually my sheet name. So right now, I don't have anything underneath 1.

If I right click and hit Current Sheet Number, Insert Field, Current Sheet Number, watch what happens. See those dashes? That's what I mean about the non-breaking space. Those will print. You don't want that. But right now we don't have a number there. If I could rename and renumber and put a 1 there and then regenerate it, there's my 1 and my Drawn By and Checked By went to blank, too.

Now, I wanted to talk about this one right here. So what some people do for C-100 is they right click Insert Field. Now in our scenario, it's under the current sheet title, C-100. But what some other people do, this is another tip, is they use something called a system variable. And they go out here to Other, System Variable, and they type C-Tab.

And I got to find it, C-Tab. There it is. C-Tab. Which actually is the system variable that controls the name of the tab here. So if I, for some reason, go to Rename & Renumber, you're going to see Prefix the layouts. If I didn't have that, and I used this as my layout name, I could change that that way as well.

So, the data is done. We've taken our project, we've populated everything for this current project. Now we want to actually separate these two files and put them in our template folder. So I'm going to close out of the sheet set, and we're going to go into the actual Exercise 6 folder. Close the sheet set, open sheet set in Exercise 6. And you can see there's nothing there.

I'm going to actually just save this drawing in there, just so I can get to it. There actually is a drawing file in there, but I want to look at it. So I'm going to right click. I'm going to open the file location. I'm going to see that there's actually a file in there. So I'm going to open that one, and it should be our sheet set with everything populated. So there's everything there. I'm going to right click again, Import Layout as Sheet, just to get it in there.

So this is the scenario we've done. We've populated everything. You can see all these fields are populated. They're connected to something within here. So right now, what we want to do is we want to save this to a .dwt and a .dst So I'm going to remove it from the sheet. This will automatically save my sheet set, my AU_Project. That's going to autosave every 60 seconds. So that's saved. And this file here, now that I know it's good, I'm going to do a File. I'm going to Save As, and I'm going to call it a .dwt.

Now I'm going to go over to the Exercise 6 folder, because I want to place it in there. I want to call this AU_Project.dwt. I'm going to actually resave it, because I want to show you this. I want to save the layers as unreconciled because I don't want to have the layer notification warning come up. Now we can set that in our Startup Suite, or any other thing like that. But give this a good name. Template for AU. Or you could say Civil Template, or whatever.

Now you close out of both of these files and you have to place them in your template folder. So what do I mean by that? I'm going to open the file location, and you see we have these templates. We just created these, .dwt and .dst. They need to go into a folder. So when I type File New, AutoCAD says, hey, I know where that's at. I'll pick it up from there. So how do we know where that's at? I'm going to right click under Options, under Files, under Template Settings, underneath here. And I left them in the same location. So I actually put the drawing template and the .dst template in the same-- Many people put the sheet set templates in a different folder than the drawing template folder. Depends completely on your company standard.

So what does this mean? This means that we've placed our templates in our folders and now we can create a new sheet set and a new drawing. So we're going to do File, New, Sheet Set, Example Sheet Set. Now that we placed that template in that folder, we see AU_Project, and you see my sheets that I created at Autodesk University. I'm going to select Next. I'm going to call up my project. And then, I'm a big fan of descriptions. I'm a Civil 3D user, and they have styles, description, so keep the descriptions.

Create folder hierarchy based on subsets. So you have things that are called subsets, which are all of these inside of here, and I'm going to show you that next. So we're going to put this in Exercise 7 folder. Hit the ellipses. Hit OK. Next. So you see, here's my subsets. And we can add more. Subsets are more like-- this is my understanding, or my logic behind this, is my project is your file cabinet. And underneath your file cabinet, you have folders. And inside those folders are your sheets, or pieces of paper. So when someone says, can you have two sheets inside the same subset? No, you'd have to make a copy of it, right? Because, think of it as a piece of paper. It's a sheet.

So I'm going to go down here. And if we want to look, we can see down here. This is what I like to look at. This is what's good. All my custom data is propertied in there. I'm going to finish.

So I started my new job, and now I want to start a new drawing and connect these two. So I do a New Drawing, and you can see AU_Project. And the first thing I want to do is take that drawing. So now, I want to save it to my project folder so I can populate the data that is common to that specific project. So I'm going under 7. I'm just going to type 10012021-C-100. I'm going to import the layout sheet. Import checked. And let's do this real quick. Let's go to Properties, and let's watch the title block when we do this. We'll change a few things. Drawing title, PROJECT 001. PROJECT 00 SECOND LINE.

This is a sheet custom property, so that's not going to do anything. You see all these data in here? If we were to populate that, that would be fine. So all of this is actually going to change in here. We'll move it up into here. This is a tip. You can move these back and forth. I'm going to Rename & Renumber. I'm going to call the sheet 2. I'm going to zoom in on my title block, do a REGEN. And you're going to see all of our common data is populated.

The key to this part is-- This is our project. So the project manager gave us a job. He told us what the project was, what the name was. We populated as much data as we possibly could within that current project. Now we want to actually separate this again and save this as a .dwt. You don't have to separate. You can just take this, go File, Save As, go .dwt, and go to your template underneath here, and you save that as your project-specific template. And I'll show you what I mean in the next lesson, because we're going to use the PUBLISHCOLLATE system variable, and then we're going to actually create a new sheet by using this template. So I'm going to close out of there. I'm going to close out of my project, close out of my drawing.

We're going to talk about PUBLISHCOLLATE, which is PUBLISHCOLLATE system variable, the command prompt, 0 or 1. 1 will actually tell me, hey, Sam, I want to publish all your drawings and put them in a folder. 0 is going to publish them separately. We're going to open up the sheet set in the Exercise 8 folder. Double click on this drawing right here. I should say sheet. Double click on the sheet. I'm going to open the file location and show you.

Do you see the templates here? That's the project-specific template. That contains page setups, which enable me to print. And by doing this drawing this way, we've actually populated all our data, and we created a new sheet template. So what do I mean by that?

The first thing I want to do after I create that .dwt, I want to come up here and say, look, this is where I want my page setups to be. The Override file. I'm going to select the window there, go to my Exercise 8 folder, select my template, and it's going to pick that up. It's going to say, Sam, look, this has some page setups in it. If it doesn't have it, you're going to get a warning. We're going to use the same drawing for sheet set creation, New. Window again. Exercise 8, Template, New. OK. Two different applications, but the file can do the same for both. I'm going to select OK. SSM. The whole time variable will save that sheet set.

So now I've done two different things. Now, if I create a new sheet, it's going to pull that template that I just showed you, that PROJECT 001, that we created off of this from there. So just say it's Sheet 3. The title would be C-102. And then a tip. My drawing number is 10012021. I'm going to do 10022021_C-102, to be consistent. That is actually your file name. I don't want to open it. Folder path. Sheet template. Select OK. Now when I double click on this sheet, it actually added that data in there with all of this populated, which is exactly what we wanted it to do. So we created a new sheet and everything looks the same.

Now for printing. I'm going to resave my sheet set. A key about sheet sets is you can right click and you can resave the whole sheet set, or you can right click and rename subsets and things like that. So what I want to do is publish. I want to print. If I wanted to print the entire sheet set, I'd do Publish. And you're going to see Page Setup Override. There's my page setup. I can manage my page setups through this scenario here, or I can just run a print.

If I wanted to print just one drawing, I could publish this way, Page Setup Override. I'll do 11 by 17. I'll just print one drawing. And you can see right now, it's just in the background. So my variable, PUBLISHCOLLATE, is set to 1. If I set that to 0, it's going to ask me for a file name. I only did one sheet because, in the essence of time, it's going to publish that job in the background, in the folder that we told it to go to. And it's almost done there. So I'm going to right click, Publish. Remember page setups. We have to make sure this PDF folder is setting up in here. So it's Exercise 8, Overrides, Outputs, PDF.

And then another trick here is-- what we don't like to do most of the time is include layer information. Clients, you don't want to give everybody the ability to turn layers on and off and reproduce your drawings. That could be detrimental. But this came up as our job, so I'm going to right click, I'm going to open my file location, I'm going to go to Output. We told it to go to PDF. And you could see that it named it by the 3 C-102. That's because the PUBLISHCOLLATE system variable is set to 1, and it published it separately. If I change that variable, it'll ask me for a file, and it'll put everything in it. But as you can see in this one, this is just our one drawing. So I'd publish that.

Next up, we're going to talk about the Sheet Index Table and a few other things there. So that's publishing and creating a new sheet. So I'm going to close out of here, close my drawings. And remember, each of these data sets is a separate lesson. So we're going to go to the Exercise 10 folder. We're jumping a little bit around here. And we're going to open up a project. And you see, the more we go into the detail, the more we go into these, the more detailed our projects become. I'm going to erase that. You could see that we've got some existing conditions. We've got a lot of different things going on in these files.

So what we're going to talk about is a sheet index table. We have our drawings, which are populated here. So we have our sheet title, sheet number, and sheet description. And that's what we want to put on the index table, right? You can put many other-- you can put revision dates and numbers on there. But the first thing we're going to do is hit the table command. And there's two tables in here. One's a sheet index, which is regular, and one's a sheet index with subsets. And we'll cover how to do both of those.

So the first thing I'm going to want to do is, I don't want to be on Layer 0. I'll create one called Index Table, or I'll make the current layer my title block layer. I'll make a current title block. So I'm going to right click. I don't want to place the index table right here, because what is going to happen is, it's going to look and it's only going to see the one sheet. So I kind of want to place the index table, and I want to actually be on this drawing. So we don't want subsets, we want Sheet Index. Remember sheet number, sheet title, remember we want a description. Select Add, Sheet Description, and we'll call this drawing Index.

Move over to your Subsets tab and make sure these are all checked, just for housekeeping. Working is a folder we used for the Model Space tab. Select OK. Select OK. And there's your sheet index table. Perfect. It's just the way we wanted. It came out great. Now if you want all these left justified, middle left, take them like that. Another trick, what I do, I always give them a horizontal margin of about 0.3, and it separates them a little bit.

Now the question always comes up, what happens if I change the drawing number? So say G-100, I want to change the properties, the drawing number. It's just Drawing Index. I don't want Drawing List. I type REGEN, nothing happens. There's a few different things you can do. I can touch this contextual ribbon, Download From Source, or I can right click and update the sheet list table here. And you can see it updated my sheet. If I go out of AutoCAD and come back in, this will not update.

But, there's one thing you can do, one trick. Under the list folder, there's the data update list. If you put this in your Startup Suite, and your drawing has an index table, it will automatically update. What do I mean by the Startup Suite? APPLOAD. Startup Suite. This is where you can load your favorite list routines, as long as your company is OK with it, that you load each and every time that you use AutoCAD. List routines are pretty harmless, depending on what they are, but we all have our tips and tricks we like to do.

OK, so what if I wanted the subsets, General, Details, Architectural, shown in this sheet table? I'm going to erase this. I'm going to do that again, Insert Sheet List Table. I'm going to show the subheader, change the subsets to that. It's a table. Check over here. They're all checked. Uncheck by Working. Select OK, and you're going to see different sort of a table.

And actually, I'm glad this came up, because now we can say, look, this is a formatting issue we got here. I'm just going to select everything, and then we're going to go to Cell Height. We're just going to type 0.35. That's how you can modify something and keep it consistent. So that's the sheet index table. You can export that over to an Excel form, and other things, too.

So let's talk about the Model Space tab. I'm going to remain in this drawing and talk about how important this tab is. The Model Space tab. We have Sheet Views, Sheet List, Model Views. I encourage each of my users to right click this and add a location. Add your project location, because what that does, if I want to look at that block for the sheet index table, I just double click it and I go into there. I can go into xrefs. I can find out exactly every one of these things, what they mean, very quickly.

So that's the Model Space tab. You can add it by just right clicking in here, and you can add multiples. You can add a location for your survey files, too, which is what I've done before. But you can add it under the Sheet List Properties right here. Model view. And you're going to see a lot of times, this field, this field, and this field will be left blank in the Sheet Set Manager.

Let me close out of here, and we're going to talk about model space views. Close out of here. And we're going to jump to Exercise 13. And I want to make sure we have enough time for our Q&A. So I'm going to open the sheet set in Exercise 13. Open up a sheet. Let's open up one of the detail sheets. So there's nothing in here, but under my model views, I know that under the detail sheets, I've got these views that are set up.

So if I go in here and double click this view, you can see that these views were created just by typing the VIEW command. And what you can do is go through and do each one by yourself. You can do Update the Boundaries, 1 to 2. And the one thing you want to do when you create a view is, you want to make sure your annotation scale is the same as your actual sheet scale when you create the view.

So how do we get these views down to our sheets? Back to my drawing, C-200. We know there's views, right? Do we need to talk about Callout blocks and View Label blocks first before we set the views? We do. So underneath here, you'll see that blocks. We have Callout blocks and a View Label block. What is a View Label block? The View Label block is the block that controls underneath your view. Your view title, your view number, your [? viewport ?] scale. What are Callout blocks? Callout blocks are standard blocks that are used underneath here to call out separate items within your drawing.

So we're going to go back and actually link these to our actual file. So Sheet Set Manager, Properties. Right up here. Callout blocks and View Label. So we know the View labels that one block. I'm going to go to Exercise 13. And under Blocks, you can see that's the View block. And we're going to choose that block. And then for Callout blocks, we're going to do the same thing, except I'm going to select that Exercise 13-- the Callout blocks folder. And you're going to see all the different blocks. I'm going to choose them. I'm going to hold down my Shift key and get them all in there.

So now I know they're available for me to use in my sheet set. Let's close out of this drawing and go to the next sheet set in the Exercise 15 folder. In the handout, you'll see there's detailed information on how to create these blocks and how to add them into our sheet set. So we're going to go into the Exercise 15 folder. I'm going to put a couple in. Open Sheet Set. You'll notice how our projects, they're bigger now.

So we're going to open one of these. And you can see, this as a view. But we'll go to the detail sheet right here. And see, we have a couple of them in here, but let's just add one more just to show you. What I like to do is make sure I'm on the right layer. That'll print. So I go to my sheet views, and I need more details in here. I want the service box setting I have. How about the chainlink fence? I'm going to right click, and I'm going to place the Callout block. This is the Callout block one.

We're going to go back to the Model views and go back to my detail sheet and look at my detailed views. And say I want the straw bale profile. Place On Sheet. AutoCAD is going to come up and say, OK, Sam, where do you want to put this view, and what scale do you want it as? I purposely have it at the wrong scale. So I'm going to right click, I'm going to select 1 to 1, place it on the sheet, and watch that Callout block on the bottom get added. You see straw bale profile. Then, when I go back to my sheet views, you'll notice that it has no number? Rename & Remember. That's going to be number 5 on our sheet set. Select OK. REGENERATE. That's number 5. So that's how you add those in there. So keep an eye out for those, the sheet views, and how to populate your data within the Sheet Set Manager.

Next up, we're going to finish this off with eTransmit and Archive, and we're going to talk about some system variables and our final projects for review. Select No. I'm going to close this, and I'm going to open up the sheet set. I'm actually going to open up one of the-- I wanted to show you Project 1, Project 2, and Project 3. Three different examples of how to use the Sheet Set Manager.

One of them is a straight-up sheet set that we've talked about, completed with everything, that you can publish, print, and use, whatever you want to do with it. You'll right click, you'll see Properties up in there, and all of this is populated. So you can go through that. The second project, 002, uses a different way to remember these. So what I did in Project 2 was I made G-100 the number here, and the sheet title here, and then unchecked that. Project 3 is your external reference file. So we can go into that one and show you, if you want. Open Sheet Set. Project 3. You notice how the xrefs, actually in the xref folder-- well, you can't see it there because it's a .dst-- This is actually where you're going to actually have a separate title block file.

And finally, let's talk about the power behind the sheets sets up in here. I can resave all sheets, create new subsets, archive, eTransmit. eTransmit I like using for single sheets, to email, to package up. Archive I use all the time to back up. I didn't save my drawing, so I'm going to save that. I'm going to right click, I'm going to choose Archive. And this is great because it's going to say, look, Sam, what do you want to do with the sheet set? And a lot of times, I'll archive it, put a note here, for a backup, not even to send to a client.

But if I was to send to the client, I go to the file street, remove any PE stamps, or anything that was confidential to our company or that we don't want to slide out there. You can use that, modify the archive setup. You can change prompt for a file name. You can purge them, and you can actually change the formats to different formats. So that's Archive and eTransmit.

And finally, as we close out here, I want to show you an example of a project that I think could benefit each of you. So we're going to open up a project. This will be in the data set folder as well. And you notice how everything is sequenced out, and you'll see that when you get your handout. So there's an example project here that I want to just open up. I actually want to open up the sheet set manager that's in that folder. So I'm going to close this. I'm going to do Open Sheet Set that's in this folder down here. It'll be in the data set when you download the data set for AU. This one right here.

So I'd like to close out on this because we have our subsets. Title Sheet, Civil Plans, Detail Sheets, Working_Not Used. This is a standard example for a company that may have a sheet set template for Civil. I'm going to right click. I'm going to choose Properties. I've got my descriptions here, my project name, my model view. My Callout blocks are labeled. Here's my project control. Here are my sheet custom properties. Drawn By, Checked By, Approved By, Designed By. Here's my sheet set custom properties, and you can see how there's some global properties. Which, if you did have the same operator Designed By on every single sheet, you would link it to here, and then all the way down to the end.

So that's a very comprehensive end to your sheet set. I did talk about system variables. SSMPOLLTIME controls the seconds the Sheet Set Manager automatically refreshes. Some people are raising that due to delays. And I know you BIM 360 users for Civil 3D, there's a lot of documentation out there. I recommend-- I'm going to go onto a different sheet set, just to show you one of my completed projects. Right now, the .dst file is located in the same location as the drawing files, right? I've got my hidden folder so you can see the backups. What you want to do if you're using BIM 360 is create a folder called Sheets, or SSM. Put your .dst file in there, and then give rights to only one person and lock out everybody else. Otherwise, there's data going back between the desktop connector and that, and it could cause some issues.

So that concludes our demonstration on the Sheet Set Manager. I want to thank everybody for your time. This has been fun, and I'm looking forward to the conversation following the Q&A.