Use this forum to ask questions about DataCAD 21 and DataCAD LT 21.
#77350 by Chris
Tue Dec 03, 2019 6:20 pm
Just upgraded from 17 to 21 and lost access to my old templates. Repathing in config did not help. Anyone else have the solution, hopefully our templates and symbols are still compatible?
#77352 by Mark Bell
Tue Dec 03, 2019 6:32 pm
Everything should still be compatible and not sure why the change of path names didn't work. Maybe check the permission status or close DataCAD and restart and try again?
#77362 by Ted B
Sat Dec 07, 2019 12:31 am
I've always done a clean install when upgrading DCAD over the years. So I have and use;
C:/x13/..../symbols,
C:/x18/..../symbols, and
C:/x21/..../symbols.
If you didn't overwrite the original "master" folder, you might still have access. You might have to do a global "search" of the drive to find were they actually are. I found years ago that Windows doesn't store program folders and "documents" where intuitively you think they were...

I keep a high-level master-folder for all my CAD work organized by project numbers and subprojects folders separate from the program files. And addl. separate master document folders for office-std. drawing templates, specifications and examples. The same with Sketchup components and symbols.

Only recently I've started to create individual DCAD symbol folders with a project-folder for symbols and SU components unique to that project. That way if I need them again for another project I can remember where I stashed them.

...I really should take more advantage of Xrefs and Self-xrefs, but I'm still a bit phobic about broken links. The same with SU components for document management.
#77398 by Chris
Mon Dec 23, 2019 4:07 pm
Thanks everyone, turns out the symbols base path has to end one directory short of the sym\ subdirectory. In my case it needed to be: J:\current\mtec\support\ in lieu of J:\current\mtec\support\sym\. It is a "base path" (duh!) and I seemed to have forgotten that from prior installs.
#77404 by Neil Blanchard
Mon Dec 30, 2019 8:23 am
Chris, now would be an excellent time to switch to the Symbol Browser - move all your symbol folders to a central place - if you share them with other people, then a network drive is best. You can take the time to rearrange the folder structure to be understandable and organized, and you can rename folders, to make them easy to find.

The Symbol Browser makes it much easier to save new symbols, and to have a list of favorite folders. If you need a particular folder to show symbols in a particular order, then I'd suggest adding a 00, 01, 02, 03, etc. prefix to get them in order.

You can also use Symbol Scale for drawing symbols, by using versions that are drawn at the size you want them to be on the paper (at full scale) and they will be sized based on the current plot scale setting. This will vastly reduce the number of drawing symbols you need to keep track of.

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