AutoCAD 2005

There are a lot of good new features in this release, although some of them may fall into the category of It’s about time.
In this article we will take a look at some of the highlights of AutoCAD 2005.

Sheet Sets are the biggest new feature in AutoCAD 2005 and may really change the way that you work. You now have a way to organise and group all the sheets within a project. This is done with the Sheet Set Manager and allows you to work with these sheets and create subsets of sheets in a tree structure.
While this may be difficult to visualise until you actually work with it, you can imagine how this will simplify the process of plotting or creating an electronic drawing set in the DWF format. You will also have the ability to update sheet numbers, sheet names, and other title block information through the Sheet Set Manager.

The plotting interface has also been simplified with more of a focus on saved Page Setups. This is not a drastic change like we had back in AutoCAD 2000 and should make plotting easier. A new option to plot in the background has also been added. This has been a request for a long time and if you have ever waited for your plot to finish before you could go back to work in AutoCAD you will appreciate this, especially during batch plotting.

The DWF format has also been extended to make it part of the review process. You can now publish a Sheet Set to DWF, review and redline it in the new DWF Composer (without using AutoCAD), and send it back to AutoCAD where you can view and address the redlines.

Tables. I shouldn’t need to say much more. We have all wanted them, we probably should have had them a long time ago, but now AutoCAD finally has real tables. You can create them in AutoCAD, you can resize columns, and yes you can copy and paste from Excel.

The DWG format stays the same! This isn’t really a feature but is important if you are concerned about compatibility. AutoCAD 2005 shouldn’t introduce any new problems because it uses the same drawing format as AutoCAD 2004.

Of course there are some new features not covered here but these are the ones that I thought were most important.
Is AutoCAD 2005 a must have upgrade? That’s up to you to decide. But I do think that there are some good new tools here that can help you be more productive.
And of course you can count on Cadapult Software Solutions to have Update classes and support services to help you with the transition to AutoCAD 2005 whenever you are ready.