one of the new features that you can take advantage of in AutoCAD 2014 is the new geographic location tool these tools allow you to find the location of your project and project a map into your drawing and it helps you by showing you the geographic surroundings of your project
these maps won’t print they’re only for aiding you in your design process and you’re going to have to be logged in to your Autodesk 360 account to take full advantage of this new tool as it is cloud-based once you do you can set your location using the set location tool in the insert ribbon tab so if we come to the ribbon click on insert go to the location panel and click on the set location now if you have like a KMZ or KML file you can load that yourself and it will work essentially the same way but we’re going to use the maps from Autodesk 360 so we’re going to click from map now you can just pan around and find the spot that you want to use or if you want to do a search say I will search for Houston press ENTER it will give you some results and if you’ve found the right spot just click the drop marker here button now if that’s not the exact spot that you need that’s ok because once you drop it in you can move that thing around so if I get this little pushpin and left-click and hold it and I can drag it around to wherever I really need to go so let’s say I want it right here and I can close this thing to get it out of the way you can pan around I want to drop it right here but once you’ve got your marker in the proper spot you’re just going to click on the continue button you have
different GIS coordinate systems and time zones here that you can switch or if you know the latitude and longitude you can click this button here to activate it and you can just set those right here if you’d like this will Center the map on your marker for you which is kind of nice you can also zoom in or zoom out with these controls go north or south and when you’re ready just hit continue
now you have to pick the spot where that pin mark is going so if you know what those coordinates need to be put it in there otherwise you probably just want it to go at zero comma zero comma zero press ENTER and now which way is north typically north is going to be straight up so you can just type in the angle or you can pick it with your crosshairs press ENTER and here’s the map so now you can just start drawing away and this gives you a bit of a reference to whatever it is that you’re working on locally you have some controls here so you can change your position display the map in the viewport or not remove the location change the marker etc
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