(Hyper)link your drawing

This is not really a Civil 3D specific tip and this command has been around for several releases, so I thought it needed to be brought back to surface for your consideration.

The ability to link drawing objects and blocks to a website is something that is sort of intriguing to me. I happened upon it several years ago, but probably like everyone else, they said “wow, cool” and then promptly forgot about it.

The key to getting this to work is in the properties. I have a very simple block of a manhole shown here. When I click on the block and go over to the properties, click on the Extended Data.

Extended Data

Click on the Hyperlink and enter the website. For this example, I am linking the block with a local mahole manufacturer.

Hyperlink info

Now back in your drawing, if you hover over the block, you will see a new glyph indicating that it is hyperlinked.

Glyph

And if you CTRL + click on the block, it will open your browser to the webpage.

Web

Pretty cool and simple. I’d like to hear your comments whether you use this feature or not.

6 comments

  1. Lisa Pohlmeyer says:

    One of the surveyors we’ve received dwgs from uses this feature to link to jpg files of benchmark points.

  2. I think we need to see the proliferation of electronic files for this to truely become usefull. We still use way too many paper drawings.

  3. Bill Green says:

    I’ve used this same technique to link to detail views on other sheets in the same drawing set.

  4. Brad Hofman says:

    I use hyperlinks as often as possible in everything I create; this tool works great to capture Filespecs, URLs and UNCs, and works fine in Vista x64:

    http://stefan.bertels.org/en/clipboardpath

  5. R.K. McSwain says:

    Lisa, that reminds me of a feature in Carlson where you can create a link to an image on an object. Then when you hover the cursor over the object, the image opens right there in ACAD, and when you move the cursor, it goes away.

  6. Sascha Langenstein says:

    It would be particularly good if the hyperlink would stay alive after plotting a pdf-file. (It already works with dwf-files.)