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Hi, I’m Charles Ellison, Civil 3D Designer and Trainer at autocadcivil3dtraining.com. Today we’ll be looking at Importing Survey Data in Civil 3D 2020. When we import data from the field, we have two options. We can import the data directly into the drawing, but others working on the project won’t have access to it. However, if we import the data into a survey database on a network, then we can share it with others working on the project.

Let’s take a look at how we can import survey data. You can always import points from an external file into the drawing using the Import Survey Data button on the Insert tab ribbon. We’ll be focusing on this method of importing data in order to bring these points into a survey database. When I choose this option, it’s going to walk me through a wizard to import the data into the survey database. Typically, anytime you see the word “Survey” in front of the functions in Civil 3D chances are you’re working with data in the database. Remember, when we’re editing a survey point we’re adjusting values in the survey database not just the drawing we’re in.

Let’s cancel out of this and create our local survey database a different way. Click on the Survey tab in the Toolspace palette and right-click on Survey Databases. Click Set Working Folder to set the directory that will contain our database. Most databases will have the working folder set to a project directory on a company network. If you put a survey database on your local hard drive, it won’t be accessible to others who might be working on the project. For demonstration purposes, we will be setting our working folder to a directory on my local hard drive.

Next, let’s right click again on the Survey Databases and select Create New Local Survey Database. We’re going to name this database “Civil3DExample” and click OK. Now there are some survey database settings some defaults that again are coming from the survey user settings here. Let’s just open up the survey database settings and see what we can edit. So first off notice that the survey database has its own coordinate zone and system. Remember, we’re not working with a drawing, we’re working with a database. The database will store everything on its own coordinate system and other values. When we import data, it’ll handle the translation for you. So we’re going to set this coordinate system.

The project we’re working on is a USA Georgia, so I come down to USA Georgia as the category. The coordinate system is NAD83 West Zone US foot and I click Okay. When I do that the distance is set to US foot and grayed out because of the coordinate system. You can always just leave the coordinate system blank and make sure the distance is set to US foot and again the translation would be fine. There’s a few other values that you can set here and then again you can choose to create somewhat a settings template to import or export those settings for future use. I’m going to go ahead and click Okay. And now our survey database is created ready to have data added to it.

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