Tips from the Insider

Today's "Tips from the Insider" was submitted by Jason Adams, Estimating Manager at Wal-Mart Realty.

"Combining a set of bid documents is really easy with Design review. 

Since things are always changing through the design phase its best that we keep the sheet separated.  We publish each sheet to a DWF.  Once the bid set goes out to the contractor to bid, I like to combine all the sheets into one DWF file.  This makes it easy to flip through multiple pages quickly and ultimately speeding up the review time.  And for those who still print, a singe DWF file allows you to open just one file to send to the printer.  In this day and age we have better things to do than sitting there opening and closing thousands of drawing just to print it out one page at a time.  Design Review has solved that dilemma.  And no, you can’t get that time back that you wasted before Design Review. 

I will show you how to take multiple DWF files and make one file.

i. Open a DWF file.  I like to open the cover page of the bid set and save that file with the job name and the date it was issued for bid.

ii. With the file open that contains the other DWF’s, select all. Ctrl-A

iii. Then drag and drop the files into Contents section of the Navigation pane.

iiii. Now save your work.

There you have it, a complete set of plans in four easy steps."

“Without Design Review, I would not be able to produce quality work with this level of efficiently.  Design Review has truly been a lifesaver.”

Comments

[David Kingham]

I just did this yesterday, works great except for the sorting, they do not stay in the same order as in explorer...is there any secret to sorting?

[Jason Adams]

The trick is to open a blank DWF and then go the the file that has all the DWF's then drag and drop everything. This way it keep the correct order.

[Stefaan Boel]

Even faster is clicking with your RMB on all the files after selecting them all and then choosing Merge!!
(http://inventorwizard.blogspot.com/2007/04/voeg-dwfs-samen-in-n-file.html)

[David Kingham]

Merge doesn't sort correctly either,
http://lh3.google.com/david.kingham/RtXahyHWCcI/AAAAAAAAAUs/iYsuf9SOznA/dwfsort.jpg
any more ideas....