AutoCAD drawings get dirty what I mean is that they get bloated with data and styles that aren’t being used anymore they may not have ever been used in fact but we’re brought in through either other blocks inserted files or by reusing other files to start a new one this happens it’s unavoidable it can however get in the way or even slow down the program because it has to remember all of these things one of the biggest deals is the size of the files if they’re too big then you’re going to have trouble emailing them to others or they’re going to take up too much room on your server or hard drive or a disk or anything so let’s open up the
architectural annotation scaling and multi leaders file
I know that’s a mouthful
this is a bloated file now one thing that we’re going to do is to delete what we don’t need anymore you know once your drawing is finished once an object a layer style or block isn’t being used anymore you can purge them from the file to do this type in the word purge press Enter the command alias is PU
opens up your purge window there are two options at the top unused items and used items the unused items are just things that you can purge out of the drawing they’re there but you’re not using them anymore now the items you cannot purge well those are things that are being used you can’t purge them out of your system so if you delete an item is it really gone well it depends on what it is objects are gone but blocks layers styles they stay in the drawing they’re taking up room in the file because it remembers them autocad assumes that since you put them in there to begin with you’re going to want to use them throughout the life of the file if we take a look at this list right now of items that can be purged it’s empty there’s nothing that we can purge out of right now so what does that mean how can I tell that well if there were something in here there would be a little plus sign so that we can open it up and we can view everything that can be purged let me show you if I select the items that cannot be purged you see now everything has a plus sign by it if I click it to expand it out these are all of the blocks that are in the file I can scroll down and some of them have weird names like this d 36 others have things like stare revision outstanding con etc but I can’t get rid of them well let’s make it so that I can get rid of some things well that’s pretty easy to do use your erase command and let’s just erase all of this stuff here
don’t save the file because we may need it later on but I just wanted to show you some things type in purge or just the letter P you and now here we have items that we can purge out we have some blocks we have some layers we’re not using them anymore so if I expand it out here are a list of different blocks that we were using in that area right here but we’re no longer using them so maybe we don’t need them
are different layers that we don’t need anymore those objects were on those layers but they were the only objects that were on these layers so we don’t need them anymore so what do you do we just hit the purge command
SQ now one at a time which one of these items do you want to purge do you want to purge block star D 27 if you do click purge this item if not skip it if you want to purge everything in this list of blocks just say purge all items and everything is gone you can look through your list you see everything is not there so we’re good we just decrease the size of our file just like that now there are items that are nested a nested items can be a pain because it was very difficult before in the past to get rid of them but now it’s a little bit easier let’s undo this so we can see it again start the purge command
items are here sometimes a block will have a layer in it that’s only used in that block well if so then it won’t be listed in our layers because it’s being used in a block now once we get rid of the block nothing is using that layer again so it’ll come down and here we’ll have to do the purge command again so that’s annoying what you can do is purge nested items so that will get rid of all the stuff that’s being used by other things that you get rid of it nothing else is getting rid of or using so it’s complicated i know but let’s say we have a block and it’s using layer XYZ and it’s the only thing using layer XYZ if we purge the block the layer XYZ is still in there because we didn’t tell it to purge it because it wasn’t listed when I use the purge command the only items that will be purged or what are listed here so sometimes items are nested inside the other / jable items so that means they’re being used well if you want to automatically purge nested items that aren’t being used anywhere else you can click the purge nested items select purge all
pick purge all items and it will get rid of everything that it can in one shot otherwise you have to go back and use the purge command several times until nothing shows up in your list anymore if you want to purge something specific like just one block or just one layer you can come here pick the one layer and select purge not purge all just purge and you now say yes I want to purge this item and it does and it leaves
everything else in now that’s a good way to clean up your file just a little bit but not just delete everything once you’re done working in your file you’ve submitted it you’ve printed it it’s done it’s good you’re not going to work on it anymore or at least odds are you’re not going to that’s a good time to purge your if you’re going to email a file to somebody that’s another good time to purge your file otherwise I suggest waiting until you’re done to purge the file unless it’s just way too big and you need the space because you never know when you’re going to need that extra layer if it was brought in to there at one time you’re probably going to need it again odds are but you may not so I would wait to purge till you’re all done and then save your file and then go back about your business because once you purge it it’s gone you can’t get it back unless you recreate that layer or that block or that text style but if you have a good template file that keeps everything in it according to your standards you can always reinsert it or bring it back in so just be careful when purging make sure you really want to and then purged away
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