ZWCAD 2023: Sheet Set Manager, a Fabulous Solution to Manage Your Drawings

When a project includes multiple drawings, the efficiency of drawings management is reduced, which affects the drafting efficiency. Have you ever opened multiple folders for a drawing but still couldn’t find it? Or opened a drawing to modify information, save the drawing, and then repeated these boring steps when you needed to modify information in many other drawings? All these experiences slowed you down and mistakes could occur due to the manual work. 

Sheet Set Manager (SSM) is a perfect solution to these problems as it allows users to manage drawings more easily. Plus, there are many more powerful features in SSM. Let’s dive into it.

Before getting started, it’s noted that SSM is only applicable when there is one drawing in one layout. Although SSM looks just like a simple tool from its panel, it can do a lot of amazing things. Overall, it can do two things: drawing management and printing.

SSM Makes Management of Multiple Drawings a Breeze

First, SSM manages drawings by the structure tree. Every layout’s name is listed on it clearly, so users can find drawings quickly. For each layout, we can perform many operations, such as opening a drawing, opening the folder where the drawing is located (our exclusive feature), numbering the layout, and importing a new layout to the current sheet set.

Figure 1. All layouts are listed on the panel.

Figure 2. Rich features on right-click menu

Secondly, in most drawings, there is a title block that includes information like project name, project number, audit date and auditor. In the past, if you want to modify the information of the title block in a drawing, you need to open the drawing, modify it and save the drawing. When you want to modify information in multiple drawings, it can be tedious and time-consuming to do it. Now, with SSM, users can directly modify information on the panel without opening a drawing, and the changes will be updated automatically in the drawing. Also, we can batch modify information in multiple drawings if they share the same fields. This significantly improves the efficiency of modifying fields in the title block.

Figure 3. Update fields without opening the drawing.

SSM Offers Multiple Ways to Publish Your Drawings

Next, let’s see what SSM can do in printing. Compared to the traditional way, printing through SSM is more convenient and flexible. Users can select one or more drawings from the panel directly to print them out. It supports file formats including PDF, DWF, and DWFX, and you can also print through the printer.

Figure 4. Choose drawings on the panel to print them out.

If there are many drawings in a project, it is cumbersome to select drawings for printing in this way. In this case, users can set up a print list on the panel. You can select as many drawings as you want from the list to print them out.

Figure 5. Choose drawings on the list to print them out.

In addition, it also supports the use of eTransmit. ETransmit can automatically package the selected drawings into a compressed folder, which makes it convenient for users to archive or package the drawings and send them to customers.

Figure 6. Use eTransmit to package files.

In a word, SSM might look simple from its look, but once you try it, it will amaze you with its robust functions. Try it out by downloading ZWCAD 2023 and enjoy your 30-day free trial!