Adding Revisions to Your Sheets in AutoCAD: A Step-by-Step Guide

Mastering Revisions in AutoCAD: Streamlining Sheet Issuance and Management

Learn how to organize, edit, and add revisions to architectural drawings using a numerical system. This article offers an in-depth guide to navigating and optimizing your document set, from incorporating alphanumeric revisions to utilizing filters for improved clarity and organization.

Key Insights

  • The article details the process of adding revisions to a set of architectural drawings, changing the numbering system from numeric to alphanumeric, and labeling the revision as 'midterm'.
  • It also provides guidance on how to organize and show revisions on different sheets, highlighting the availability of plugins for automated application across multiple sheets.
  • The article further elucidates managing large sets of architectural drawings, including the creation of placeholder sheets and the use of filters to control the visibility of sheets according to their revision status.

Note: These materials offer prospective students a preview of how our classes are structured. Students enrolled in this course will receive access to the full set of materials, including video lectures, project-based assignments, and instructor feedback.

To close out this lesson, what we're going to do is we're going to add the revision to the sheets that we are issuing right now. And so we do have the whole cartoon set created and you can see that there are a lot of sheets showing up in here. And that's fine.

And there's a couple of things that I want to show you how we can either show them or not show them. But first we're going to do is we're going to add the revision. And so from my view tab, we can go to revisions.

And what I want to do is I want to revise the one that was already created. And by default, there's always going to be one there. And so we're going to change it from the numbering to be numeric to alphanumeric.

And that means we're going to use letters instead of numbers. And then the description, we're going to just go ahead and call it midterm. And then we'll hit OK.

And now what we can do is the sheets that we're issuing are going to be the A000, A001,002, and 003. And so we want to add that revision to these sheets. And so right now I'm on A00, the title sheet.

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I can go in and I can edit this. And I can click the box to say show revision on sheet. So revisions on sheet, edit, show revision in the schedule.

And so essentially by doing that, you can now see that the revision is A, and it's for the midterm. There's a couple of things that we can do here with revisions. And so one of them is you can either do it per project, meaning that's always going to be number A, regardless of whether it's the first or it's the 15th revision on the sheet, that's always going to be A. If you do it per sheet, then the A is always going to be the first one on here.

For our purposes, we're going to go with per project. So I'll continue that. I'm going to change the revisions on the demolition floor plan, second floor plan now.

And if you're worried, you're looking at us doing this now and you're thinking, man, this is crazy. If I have like 50 sheets, I have to apply this to. Don't worry, there's plenty of plugins that you can get to do this for you.

Okay. And then we're going to go to our, we're going to go back to our title sheet. And you can see the only sheets that we're issuing are these four here, but the rest of them are showing up even though they're not even created.

And that's because they're placeholder sheets. If we were to go to create these sheets, we can create the rest of them. And if you notice what I did there, I actually didn't use the right title block.

And this is one of those cases where it's actually more trouble than it's worth. So I'm just going to undo that because I would rather not have those sheets created with the, um, title block incorrectly and go back and recreate them, then try and go through and change the title block because it just messes up the origin of a lot of things. And so it's easier to do it that way.

So again, we'll go back to sheet, make sure we have the right title block, and then we'll pick the ones we want to create, which is going to be all of these. And now we have all the sheets created, even though they're not being issued at this point in time. So a couple of things I want you to look at, we have this option for appears in sheet list.

And so what I could do is I could go through on each one of these and uncheck that box and that would take them off the sheet index. So I'll show you if I take these two off of here, a 201 and 202, and then go back to my title sheet, you can see a 201 and 202 are no longer going to appear. Now, I think that's a okay way to do it.

I don't see anything wrong with it, but it also has its problems because they'll never come back unless you manually go in and change that. And that's a manual operation that you have to do on multiple different sheets. So what I'm going to do is I've gone to my sheet list here and we can control this with one operation.

So I could say filter, and I could say filter by, and I can say current revision equals, and then I can enter in the current revision, which in our case is A. And what it'll do is if the revision does not equal A, it'll remove it from this list. When I hit okay, now I've only got the sheets that have that current revision and we should be good to go. When we do the next print for our final, we can change this filter by either taking it off altogether, or we can make it so that it incorporates both the current revisions.

Now when we look at our title sheet, we've got the sheets that we want included on here, and we've got the correct revision on our title block as well. So I'm going to go ahead and save, and then I'll do a quick overview on how we print PDF, and that'll wrap up the first half of the class.

photo of Michael Wilson

Michael Wilson

Revit Instructor

Bachelor of Architecture, Registered Architect

Mike is recognized by Autodesk as one of North America’s leading Revit Certified Instructors. He has significant experience integrating Revit, 3ds Max, and Rhino and uses Revit Architecture on medium and large-scale bio and nano-tech projects. Mike has been an integral member of the VDCI team for over 15 years, offering his hard-charging, “get it done right” approach and close attention to detail. In his spare time, Mike enjoys spending time outdoors with his wife, children, and dog.

  • Autodesk Certified Instructor (ACI GOLD – 1 of 20 Awarded Globally)
  • Autodesk Certified AutoCAD Professional
  • Autodesk Certified Revit Professional
  • Revit
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