Furix

Top Ten User Tips

For New users:

1. Close your drawings in AutoCAD before you compare them. CompareDWG makes no changes at all to the original drawings. To guarantee this, it will not operate on drawings that you have currently opened in AutoCAD.
2. If some entities are hidden behind other entities, use the AutoCAD commands Tools / Display Order to choose which one is displayed on top.
3. Allow CompareDWG to automatically delete temporary files; otherwise your hard disk may fill up pretty quickly. You can change this in your Preferences.
4. In the Preferences you can select your own markup colours.
5. Always have a look at the Summary Report when you have run a Detailed Comparison. It gives a good overview of the results of the comparison.
6. If it is difficult to spot the differences, use the Visibility command to hide the Unchanged Entities.

For advanced users:

1. The Temporary Drawings created by CompareDWG are regular AutoCAD drawings; hence you can manipulate them with all regular AutoCAD commands. However, remember that none of these files contains the "complete picture"; each contains only a selection of the entities, for example deleted entities only. If you want to make any changes to drawings then these changes should probably be applied to the original drawings.
   Then again, if you do make any changes to temporary drawings, make sure you save the file using a different name and preferably in a different directory. This will prevent CompareDWG from deleting the file.
2. You can also use temporary drawings as Xrefs, for example in combination with the original drawings. Again, if you want to keep them you should save them somewhere else to avoid automatic deletion.
3. You may compare a file against itself. This will not generate any temporary drawings, but it will generate the reports, which you can use to get an idea about the entity types and their quantities used in the drawing.

For all users:

1. Also read the FAQ.