when you work with AutoCAD you will often find it useful to have more than one drawing file open at a time and some of those drawings will have multiple drawing tabs or paper space tabs in them navigating through that mess can be difficult and sluggish how do you know which drawing you need or what tab you need especially if they hurt your files a very quick method of switching through open drawings is by pressing ctrl + tab at the same time I have two files open now just this one in another blank one if I press ctrl + tab at the same time it will toggle me through my open files I keep pressing and it will take me back and forth now I can also press ctrl shift tab and that will reverse the direction that I’m traveling through I only have two files open right now so the direction is irrelevant but if we had three or four then you get the idea but what if you have let’s say 10 drawings open and each one of them has 5 tabs and plus when you press ctrl + tab at the same time it only takes you to the current layout tab that you had open last in that file so what if it’s the wrong one okay there is another way to get around this you can also press ctrl + page up to toggle through your current drawing you can also hit page down page down will take you through your tabs page up will take you in the opposite direction so that’s one way to get through your different layout tabs in your file that you have currently open control tab is really easy to do the page up and page down can be a little cumbersome let’s open up a drawing with multiple tabs in fact will open up several of them here I’ll just go through my recent files list and pick a couple of them
this will work nicely there are two tools that are
more to each other and we kind of took a brief look at them in a previous section where we talked about the status bar controls they are quick view layouts and quick view drawings so let’s open up a drawing that has multiple tabs in it in fact all that I’ve opened have them and you can open up any files or you can just watch what’s going on here right here is the button on the status bar on the bottom of your screen the quick view layouts and to the right of that is a quick view drawings if I pick it it will show me all the tabs available for the drawing that I have open now and I can quickly pick one or the other and go to it
the current one will be highlighted with the screen box and the name is bold so now I know what I’m looking at Oh to the quick view drawings
pick it the left click
shows me all the files that i have opened
of course the one that it’s bold and the one with the green box is the current drawing and I can go to one of the others or any of the other files and then go up to their paper space tabs and I can go directly to it or a model space tab as in this case so there are two sets of previews one for the file itself and one for the tabs in that file now as I’m working in these I have some controls of what I can do I can pin this by clicking here on the left so this is always going to be open now
this to be quite honest but you have the option maybe you want to quickly review some drawings and you have them all open and you want to be able to jump around in them very quickly then you may want to do that
you can also as I just showed you by accident click on a plot button so you can print your drawing or publish we’ll talk about publishing later Publishing is a big batch plotting when you want to print more than one drawing at a time you can do that
you can also open files here start a new file or close the quick view drawings option all together so that’s one way to quickly navigate through your files that you have open and through all the drawing tabs that are available to them with a visual interface
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