Subtitles of the Movie

In this exercise we're going to look at the WBLOCK Command. As you can see in the Title Bar there, WBLOCK. Now the W in WBLOCK stands for Write as in write with a pen. W-R-I-T-E and what you can do with the WBLOCK Command is either write a Block or a Drawing to its own separate DWG file that you can then insert as a Block into your current drawing. Drawings can be inserted as Blocks in AutoCAD also, as well as normal AutoCAD Blocks. Now what we're going to do here is we're going to insert a block into the drawing from another drawing, so we're going to take the Telephone here and WBLOCK it. Now the easiest way to get the WBLOCK Command to kick in is to type it, so type WBLOCK and press Enter. So the option we have here now is we can either use the entire drawing, like so, which allows us to select everything in the drawing, or we can utilize a Block or Objects. I'm going to utilize a Block first and I'm going to select Telephone. Now I don't need to worry about Base Point or Objects because it takes that from the Block Definition in the drawing already. I select a file name and a path by clicking on this button here. That's going into, you'll notice, my Drawings folder for my Work Files for this particular section. I'm just going to call it Telephone.dwg because that then gives it the same name as my Block already in the drawing. You'll see what happens in a moment. I click on OK, you see that little flash in the corner of the screen, that's AutoCAD writing the Block to a drawing. So if I now click on Open and go into my Drawings folder, there's my Telephone.dwg. So I'm now going to open that and I'll just do a Zoom Extents there so that we can see what we're doing and I'm going to remove some objects from this drawing, so I'm going to erase those by using the Erase on the Modify Panel, so I erase those and I'm going to erase those. You'll notice, even though this was a Block and it's been taken over to a DWG, I can edit the individual entities there. I'm now going to save that drawing so I click on Save and then I'm going to close that drawing. Now, nothing's changed in the original drawing. If I now go Insert Block, though on the Block Panel here, Insert and I go Browse and select my Telephone from the list and click on Open, I'm going to Specify Onscreen an Insertion Point, leave the Scale and the Rotation as they are and click on OK. I now get prompted that I already have a Block called Telephone in the drawing, what do I want to do? I'm going to redefine the Block. Watch what happens. The Block that I changed in the DWG comes in like so, but it updates all other instances of the Block called Telephone. So if I've got 600 Telephones to edit on one floor of a building, isn't that a great way to do it? WBLOCK it out, make the changes, reinsert that DWG as a Block. Fantastic! What I could also do there if I WBLOCK again is I could select the entire drawing, like so. Notice where the origin is there? X-Y? What I'll do now is I'll OK that, that goes in and it's now been changed as a Drawing. So what I'll do now is I'll go Insert Block again. This time I'll Browse and I've got there, notice it's just called it New Block and there's the Preview of it. Click on Open, Insertion Point, Specify Onscreen, OK it. Notice it brings it in at the 0,0 point every time, so that's my Insertion Point. Left-click and that is now a whole Block called Workstation. So I can do either the entire drawing or an individual object using WBLOCK to make changes to my Blocks.