Autocad and Large Files

I hear all the time about large files causing issues. This leads us to a couple commands that seem to get missed. "PARTIALOPEN" and "PARTIALOAD" the combonations of these two commands can save you a lot of time. First of all to do a partial open you can get to this by starting the open command and selecting the file you want then going to the Open button select the option arrow to right of it. From here select Partial open.

Now select the layers that you want to load as well as specifing the views. Now is the time to tell you that the view is critical, if you set up views in advance you have a lot more control over the command. You see only goemetry that fall with in the view you selected. This is the most powerfull part of the command as now you can control loads by region or zones of work. Now lets talk about "PARTIALLOAD" this command allows you to load other things you think you need later. If you have any questions let me know and I will expand on this. How well does this work? Well that depends on how large your files are in the first place. The larger the files the bigger the impact. The bigger they are the harder they fall, right? One of my users was complaining about files taking 15 minutes to open. With this command we where able to get this down to 2 minutes. So if your users all can save 10 minutes a day wow. I will be looking at this in more detail later.