I Fear I'm Doing Things Inefficiently

Started by ogg130, September 05, 2008, 04:12:52 PM

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ogg130

Hello everyone. At work, I have been tasked with converting some Autocad Drawings of our data center's floorplan into Visio documents.

Basically the process is as follows:

Open the Autocad 2003 file into Visio 2003.
Trace the walls of the imported Autocad drawing with the line tool
Delete the imported Autocad 'image'
Add grid crosshairs and grid locations for every grid square on the diagram.

The grid crosshairs and grid locations have made the drawing huge. Initially, I just drew them all in, but saw a blog on this site that mentioned master shapes and started using those, which converted thousands of tiny tile location markers and grid markers into 25 larger blocks of each type (50 total). This dropped the file size by about 2meg down to 6mb.

There is barely any grouping in my document. I tried to make the entire 'building envelope' a group and collapsing it, recorded the file size on both options and there wasnt more than a half a mb change.

I still find this to be pretty high considering the autocad documents, fully populated with floor equipment are only about 2mb in size. So far my visio drawings are just a shell, only using about 6 layers, without any of the hundreds of pieces of equipment that populate the floor represented, and I shudder to think what may become after beginning to add the floor equipment drawings.

Is there anything that anyone can suggest, in terms that a newbie to visio may understand, to minimize the size im taking up here? Are we barking up the wrong tree trying to use visio for documents of this scale?

I can supply the document if need be, along private channels, if my picture hasn't been made clear.

Thanks!

joemako

#1
could this be what you are looking for:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa168345.aspx

ogg130

#2
I was hoping to see if I was making any common efficiency errors, but this may prove very useful as well. Thank you!

wapperdude

#3
This is a question from ignorance since I've not ever imported an autocad file, but, why are you creating the grid structure?  Visio provides grids -- is it a printout thing, do the autocad / Visio grids not match up?  There is some flexibility to setting the Visio grids, and you can use the page setup to turn grid printing on.  So, assuming that you still need to add the grids (that seems like a lot of work), can you do it just once on a background page, and have it apply to all of the sheets?   :-\
Visio 2019 Pro

Visio Guy

#4
Visio shapes (or "entities") are a bit heavier than AutoCAD's lines and circles and squares, because each Visio shape has the potential to hold text, handle a small amount of events, and contain a number of Excel-like smart formulas in its ShapeSheet.

So Visio drawings aren't as light-weight when it comes to CAD representations as a dedicated CAD program. Visio is really optimized for flow-diagrams, since probably over 90% of Visio drawings are some sort of flowchart, org-chart or network diagram.

That being said, I've always felt that Visio had a huge potential in the cad-arena, because it just does some things in a much smarter way.

You can make shapes a bit more efficient by combining like-formatted geometry together where it makes sense. (See: Shape > Operations > Combine) And make sure that you draw rectangles, not four lines, like you'll find in some cad drawings.
For articles, tips and free content, see the Visio Guy Website at http://www.visguy.com
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ogg130

Thank you everyone for the input. The information about Visio shapes makes much sense and I can use that if asked why visio drawings are so much larger than their autocad counterparts.

As for the grid lines... I really am not sure why I was making my own grid componants... I guess it was because it was a layer in autocad previously, and I wasn't really aware how well the grid line option works with Visio. Thanks!

ogg130

Bleh, well unfortunately, the app were using that im creating these conversions for uses visio viewer to display the drawings, and for some reason the drawing actually appears a bit to left of where it was drawn at, if that makes sense.

Unfortunately, the built in grid displays in the right place in visio viewer, but the drawing is whats moved over, making the gridlines impossible to use.

I guess ill just go to lines for the grid instead of crosshairs. Thatll save about 2mb. The only reason we used crosshairs was for plotted visibility. Shrug.

Thanks for the suggestions, however!

wapperdude

That sounds painful!

By any chance, did you re-center the drawing before you put it into the viewer?  That could have shifted the drawing off grid.  Hard to believe that the viewer would shift your drawing--but the world is full of surprises.

You might try one thing to avoid all those grid lines.  Place a large rectangle all the way around your converted CAD items.  Set it to no fill and no lines -- an invisible shape.  The Viewer should see that as it's reference object and keep everything on grid.  Beats all those little lines. 
Visio 2019 Pro