The Design Center in AutoCAD not only allows you to pull content like blocks and layers out of an existing drawing into the current drawing you are working on but it also helps in looking for content/text within your drawings on your computer/network.
This nifty little search function embedded within the Design Center allows for searching content of the following order.
- Blocks
- DetailViewStyles
- Dimstyles
- Drawings
- Drawings and Blocks
- Hatch Pattern Files
- Hatch Patterns
- Layers
- Layouts
- Linetypes
- Multileaderstyles
- Sectionviewstyles
- Tablestyles
- Textstyles
- Visualstyles
- Xrefs
Selecting Look for Drawings changes the interface to accommodate three tabs that could be useful in your search.
The first is the Drawings Tab. This allows you to search for words or parts of words in either your File Name, Title, Subject, Author or keywords. Not only does the search look in the folder you specified it can also search in the sub folders as well.
The Date Modified Tab allows for either searching in every single file it finds or you can narrow the search down to files created between 2 dates or files that have been created in the (n) number of months or (n) number of days previously.
Think about how many times you haven’t remembered the name of a file but you know for a fact that you created a file in the last week and you saved it in a folder but for the life of you, you cannot remember what you named it.
The final tab allows for searching text in either the Block name, Block and drawing description, Attribute tags and Attribute values.
This search functionality is really powerful as it really gets into the mat of metadata embedded in the AutoCAD drawing as well blocks and attributes residing in those blocks.
Once again a great tool for a great product.
