Use the WBLOCK command to write blocks or objects to an external drawing file - AutoCAD Tutorial

- [Instructor] We're staying in our new office proposal_blocks.DWG file. And you can see I've zoomed out a bit to look at the overall layout of the new office. Now talking of overall layouts, imagine that you're working in a commercial project with a big floor plan with say 500 instances of one of the workstation blocks that we've got in this drawing. If you wanted to edit the content of that block there's a quick way of doing it and it's using the W Block command, the right block command. So all you need to do is go to the insert tab on the ribbon go to the block definition panel click on the Flyout and select right block. That is the W Block command right there. Now you've got three different options. With right block, you can use block which is the one we are going to use. Click on the flyout here. There's all the blocks in the drawing. I'm going to select our works station LH block which is this one here. There's our Workstation LH block that we created previously in previous videos. Notice base point and objects are grayed out. For that reason you can obviously reuse the entire drawing content or just select it object content in the drawing and write that out to its own separate DWG file instead. Great for content reuse on existing drawings we now need to define the file name and path where the block is going to be saved out to its own separate DWG file. So we click on the ellipsis button and you can see there that I've already got a workstation LH DWG file in there where I've been testing it. So what I'm going to do now is I'm just going to right click on that and I'm going to delete it like so. There we go. And that's gone. So I'm going to save a new workstation LH drawing to that particular location. I'll click on save like so, units of millimeters back to the dialogue box. Just click on okay, and you'll see a little flicker top left that's indicating that the block has now been written out to its own separate DWG file. So what I want to do now is edit that DWG that has the same name as the block, and then bring the drawing in as a block to overwrite the existing block definition. So I go up to open on the quick access toolbar there's workstation LH.DWG there. So I click on open and when you open it up it'll look blank. Don't panic, just double click on the wheel to zoom extents. There it is there. The reason being is it puts the insertion point of the block you've written out to the DWG at zero zero. You can see where the Y and the X intersect there. Now in this particular case, my workstation LH.DWG needs those attributes removed. I don't want the attributes anymore, so I select them right click, erase them like I would any other AutoCAD object. I then go up to save, save on the quick access toolbar and save the workstation LH.DWG file. I can now close that. I'll click on the cross there on the file tabs and we're back to our new office proposal drawing. So I now need to bring that particular DWG file in to this drawing to overwrite the existing workstation_LH block. Very quick and easy to do. Again, insert tab on the ribbon click on insert on the block panel and you'll see there that you've got a recent blocks option. Click on that. That will open up your blocks palette in later versions of AutoCAD. You can also use the classic insert command. If you're working with older versions of AutoCAD it's a classic insert, press enter. There's a browse option to browse to your workstation_LH.dwg file on the blocks palette it's this little like icon here, just there. So I can navigate to where I can bring a drawing in as a block. So I click there. Notice it's the same folder where I save the workstation LH.DWG file. Notice the preview. There are no attributes in there. Click on open like so and it'll ask me to redefine the block. Now at the moment, there are two instances. There are, there's one there, there's one there. So what I'm going to do is redefine those two instances redefine block, and there's my new one there. Now I'm just going to pop that outside of the office there and click like so. So you'll notice the new definition doesn't have any attributes. I can now close the blocks palette. I don't need that anymore and I'm just going to pan across. Now here's the weird thing. I've redefined the block in the drawing but only the new block that I've brought in hasn't got the attributes. So as per previous videos we go to the block definition panel here click on the flyout, synchronize, and it'll now say enter an option, question mark, name or select. If you now just select your block like so select that one there. You'll notice do I want to synchronize it? Yes, I do. And notice it synchronizes that particular block definition. So all of the blocks now regardless of whether you've only got two or 500 will update to the non attribute block that you created in the W blocked DWG file. Now it's a fairly convoluted little workflow but it's incredibly useful and will save you a huge amount of time. Also, bear in mind that you might just have this particular type of question on your AutoCAD certified professional exam. So jump in, investigate the W block command in more depth. Have a mess around with it. See what it does. Have a go with block objects and drawing in that W Block dialogue box as well. See how they all work because you just don't know which particular type of W block methodology might pop up on your exam.