AutoCAD – Opening a drawing with a user defined named view

By Dennis Collin

When working on large or complex drawings there is often a requirement to be able to quickly view or present specific small areas within a drawing. Examples include a toilet or stairwell in an Architectural Plan, a component detail within a large mechanical assembly, or a culvert or bridge detail on a civil engineering plan.

Named views can be created quickly using the New View command located on the View tab of the Ribbon. Alternatively, users can type in ‘VIEW’ from the command prompt.

Once created these named views can be recalled in either model or paper space. However, it is also possible to select this user defined view and have AutoCAD display the view upon the initial open command.

When accessing the file from the dialogue tick the ‘Initial View’ option, click open and select the desired name view. The file will then display the selected named view, this can save lots of time on large or complex drawings.

If an error message about no defined viewport is displayed. Then drawing has been left in paper space with no viewports created. This can be remedied by switching to model space and saving or ensuring at least one viewport has been created within the Paper Space environment.

There are many other ways to add Views to sheets, one is the Sheet Set Manager, another is to use the dynamic view creation introduced in AutoCAD 2019. I will post about this in a future blog.