Autodesk is officially on vacation for a week of rest. Let me tell you - I LOVE it when everyone at the company takes a vacation at the same time. That means we don't go back into the office facing a mound of emails, requests, etc. I wish all of our vacation time was nice and organized like this - with a few extra days to take at your leisure. Since I travel so much for work - I am thoroughly enjoying a nice week at home where I plan on catching up on all those "projects" that just never seem to get done.
Last week I had the privilege of visiting two great customer sites: Alstom Power and SimplexGrinnel. While presenting at Alstom, one of the attendees told me they were frustrated because their layers weren't alphabetized anymore. I asked him how many layers they were dealing with and he told me about 1400! Wow! They are highly standardized and apparently each of those layers has a specific purpose. That brings me to today's AutoCAD Hip Tip:
An AutoCAD Hip Tip for Drawings with Loads of Layers:
There is a system variable inside of AutoCAD called MAXSORT. MAXSORT controls the maximum number of named objects (such as blocks and layers) that AutoCAD will sort (or alphabetize). For most users, the default setting of 1000 works just fine and you'll probably never need to change it. In my example above, Alstom Power had more than 1000 layers and consequently their layers were no longer listed in a nice logical alphabetical fashion. Imagine searching through 1400 layers looking for a named layer when they aren't alphabetized? Yikes!
So it's simply a matter of increasing that number to suit your needs...the highest you can set MAXSORT to is 32,767. If you have more than 32,767 layers - we definitely need to talk!
You may also find that some layers don't even appear in the layer listing if you breach the MAXSORT value...all things to keep in mind!
Incidentally - MAXSORT was originally introduced early in AutoCAD's lifetime because some people didn't like AutoCAD to alphabetize their layers. They wanted the layers used the most to be at the top of the listing, those used the least to be towards the bottom. The order the layers were input into the system was the order they displayed. Make sense? Pretty clever.
I'm off to enjoy another day of vacation - maybe do some baking today (we have a pear tree loaded with pears). I'm not really a big pear fan - but am happy to bake them up for others!
Enjoy what's left of summer...
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