Chapter 17

Interoperability

No man is an island, and it’s the rare designer who works alone. Even in a one-person design team, breaking the project into finite elements, such as grading, paving, and utilities, makes sense from a plan production and management standpoint. To do so effectively, your design software has to understand and have some method for bringing in Land Desktop data as well as other third-party software which can result in better drawing management. Then you also need to take the Civil 3D design and give it to non-Autodesk clients. In this chapter, we’ll look a variety of methods for importing and exporting data.

In this chapter, you will learn to:

• Create data shortcuts
• Import and export to earlier releases of AutoCAD
• Import and export to third-party CAD programs
• Use basic map queries to filter data