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Here I am in Happy Dana world just working away on some alignments in Civil 3D 2008.  I create an alignment and I give it a name of “Defford Road”.  Then I make another alignment and notice that by default, its name is “Defford Road”, too.  Then another “Defford” then another…. what is happening?  Why oh why?

Then I realized that the first time I changed the name of my alignment, not only did it change the name for that particular alignment, but it also changed the NAME TEMPLATE for alignments all together… Hmmm…. I don’t like that.  The obsessive template manager in me wanted to scream and pull my hair out- why bother setting up a template if one override makes a permanent change?

After James talked me off the ledge, he pointed out that in 2007 the “Save Command Changes to Settings” in Drawing Settings is toggled to YES in all three default templates in 2008.  We talked about this before as something you might want to consider toggling in 2007 here.

This means, any time you change the defaults in one of those “Create Whatever” dialog boxes, such as which label set is used, or the name of the object, it will stick around.  Any object- alignments, profiles, pipe networks, etc.

 

Let’s just say I immediately changed all of mine back to “NO” (if there was a “HECK NO” I would have chosen that) because to me, if I want something to bring up different options, I am going to change the command setting defaults themselves.

To me, this reminds me of that workspace setting where you can save changes to your workspaces as they are made- which defeats the purpose of saving a workspace doesn’t it?

If you like this, by all means, leave it set.  Or maybe it will be useful during your first project because it will set your command preferences automatically, then you can shut it off.