Save Your Settings With Layer States: Tuesday Tips With Frank

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In this week’s Tuesday Tips with Frank, you’ll dive into the wonders of Layer States in AutoCAD, a feature that can significantly boost your efficiency by saving your carefully curated layer settings. Imagine you’re an HVAC designer working off an architectural floor plan—you don’t want to sift through all the unnecessary layers repeatedly. With Layer States, you can save your current settings and easily restore them, even if a well-meaning colleague makes changes, or transfer them to different floors in a multi-story building. Enjoy the streamlined workflow and spend more time designing, not fiddling with layers! Have you ever found yourself endlessly tweaking layer settings in AutoCAD, only to be frustrated by having to do it all over again the next time you open your drawing? You’re not alone. In fact, it’s a common challenge among AutoCAD users. Let’s dive into how you can save your sanity by saving your settings with Layer States.

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Table of Contents

Save Your Settings With Layer States: Tuesday Tips With Frank

In my last blog post, I showed you how to use various filtering mechanisms to better manage your layer list in AutoCAD. We focused a lot on the “how” of it. However, aside from better managing a large layer list, we didn’t touch much on the “why” behind it. The simple answer is that you probably need to either change the visibility of a group of layers or alter their properties.

Why You Should Care About Layer States

Imagine you’re an HVAC designer in an AEC studio. You use the architect’s floor plan as your base file for your HVAC plan. You don’t want all their furniture, cubicles, etc., and your standards say that the HVAC plans should have the walls grayed out, specifically using AutoCAD color 8.

Using various tools, and hopefully, the filter tools we learned about last time, you go about turning things off and changing the necessary layer colors to 8. Now, you have the architectural base layers set for you to start your design. You don’t want to do it again, do you? That’s where Layer States comes in handy. You can save the current layer settings to a named list within the drawing so that it’s quickly restored if some well-meaning co-worker changes them for you.

Layer States Manager: Your New Best Friend

The Layer States Manager dialog is where the magic happens. Launch it from the Layer Properties Manager palette. It’s the third icon in the upper left corner.

Clicking it will display the Layer States Manager dialog, which will probably be empty initially. The first step is to create a new state and give it a name. Think of this as taking a snapshot of your layers’ display and property settings.

Once you dismiss the New State save box, your state will be listed in the States panel.

Step	Action
Open Layer States Manager	Click the third icon in the Layer Properties Manager palette.
Create New State	Click ‘New’, name your state, and save.
Save the State	Confirm to add it to the States panel.

Customizing Layer States

You’ll have a lot of control over what layer settings are restored. Expand the dialog by clicking on the chevron in a circle next to the Help button. This will allow you to set up a custom set of visibility or properties to restore. Whether you leave the side panel expanded or contracted is entirely up to you.

Once you save your drawing file, the layer state will still be there, waiting for you or someone else to restore its settings.

Practical Example: More Than Just a Single Floor

Let’s extend our imagination a bit further. Suppose this was just the first floor of a multi-story building. You can even import these settings into any subsequent floor. Not only will that remove repetition and potential human error, but it will also increase efficiency. This is where importing and exporting Layer States come into play.

Importing and Exporting Layer States

Remember that multi-floor scenario we talked about? You can export a Layer State to an external file for use elsewhere. Just select the desired state from the Layer States list and click on Export. You’ll be directed to a File Explorer window to choose the location for the state. The resultant file will have an LAS extension.

Importing a Layer State works similarly. Navigate to your file’s location, select it, and click open. Remember to change your file type pulldown to LAS.

You have other choices if you don’t want to create an LAS file. You can select a DWG, DWS, or DWT that has at least one state in it. A separate dialog will allow you to choose the state you want.

Once the import is successful, you’ll receive a dialog asking if you want to restore the state you just imported. Choose wisely.

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Summary

Personally, I like the idea of writing external LAS files. What a tremendous backup opportunity—but that’s the CAD manager in me. I used to set up Layer States in my project templates so that my users never had to go through the manual process of setting visibility and properties.

Hey, it takes time to set up your layers correctly for your design tasks. But don’t do it more than once if you don’t have to. Save those settings into a layer state and take a moment to write them out to a LAS file. Because if we know anything in our industry, we know that “things” happen.

More Tuesday Tips

Check out our whole Tuesday Tips series for ideas on how to make AutoCAD work for you. Do you have any favorite AutoCAD tips? Tell us in the comments!

The post Save Your Settings With Layer States: Tuesday Tips With Frank appeared first on AutoCAD Blog.

By focusing on better layer management, you can transform how you handle your AutoCAD projects, saving you time and reducing frustration. And who knows? You might even find yourself enjoying the more organized and efficient workflow.

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