From the course: AutoCAD 2026 Essential Training

Editing XREFs in AutoCAD - AutoCAD Tutorial

From the course: AutoCAD 2026 Essential Training

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Editing XREFs in AutoCAD

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- [Instructor] We're staying in our New Office Proposal.dwg file at the moment, and that is our host drawing where our Xref is virtually attached to via, let's say, a virtual paperclip. Now, as you can see, there's the landscaped area on the right hand side of the office block there, like so. Now I've also got that Landscaping Area.dwg file open. And what I want to demonstrate in this video is how someone else can be working on that Landscaping Area drawing, And then when you are going back into your New Office Proposal drawing, AutoCAD will say, "Hang on a minute, the Xref has changed. You need to reload it in your host drawing." So let's go to the Landscaping Area, like so. There it is there. And as you can see, we've got some simple rectangles, some hatching, and so on. What I'm going to do, is I'm just going to go to the Home tab on the ribbon and check out what layers I've got. So can you see, we've got a landscaping layer there, so make sure you're on the landscaping layer. And I'm just going to add a random rectangle to the Landscaping Area drawing. So I'm going to go up to the Draw panel on the Home tab on the ribbon, click on the flyout, select Rectangle. And I'm going to go from this end point snap here. Left click, and I'm just going to drag a rectangle out and up to the right and click again like so. So can you see I've made a change there to the Landscaping Area. So what I'll do now is I will save that drawing like so. So I'll save that. So that's now saved with that new rectangle. What happens if I go back to the New Office Proposal drawing? If I go in there, oh look, Autodesk is going, "You need to reload the Landscaping Area." Now it says by P3650, that's just the name of my computer by the way, P3650. But it's my username. So if you've got a username where all your computers say, have Shaun Bryant as their username, it will let you know who's made the change. You can also compare the changes. I'm going to untick that, there is a tool in AutoCAD called Xref Compare, and you can compare different iterations of your Xrefs if you want to. I'm not going to worry about that today though. So if I now reload Landscaping Area and just click on the link, can you see the new rectangle is now added to the Xref there that is attached to the host drawing, the New Office Proposal drawing. And that's how quick and easy it is. You can give out that Xref file to somebody else. They can work on it. When they save it, AutoCAD prompts you to say, "Oh, you need to reload that Xref because some changes have been made." And it's a really useful tool for collaborating on your AutoCAD drawings.

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