You may be provided with an as built drawing where the units are unfamiliar. Projects in Germany used meters, in France centimeters and in Britain millimeters and you are most comfortable using imperial units. It might be helpful to have multiple dimension types so you can see both units and your client in Germany can relate to the dimensions shown.
You can enter a value for units in the temporary dimension to change the dimension. Select the object you want to move, click on the temporary dimension and enter your value. If your file units are imperial and you want 15' – 0" you would enter 15 and the units are implied.
If the as built were metric, you can enter metric units. If you want to enter metric units you can enter the value with an appended unit (5m - or 500cm or 5000mm) to make the change.
It would be helpful to have a dimension that reports on the alternate units. Select the imperial dimension style, on the properties palette click Edit > Duplicate. Add – Meters after the name.
Under the Text tab, change to the values shown and click OK twice to exit.
You now have imperial and metric dimension style types and you can select a dimension and change the type as needed. You can work with both for entry of values and see your dimensions in imperial and metric.
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Jim Cowan
AEC Senior Application Specialist
Jim Cowan’s extensive AEC design industry experience, Autodesk design solutions expertise, and status as an Autodesk Certified Instructor have made him a sought after university curriculum developer, instructor, and presenter. Jim’s areas of expertise include eLearning, interoperability between solutions, and overcoming barriers to the adoption of Building Information Modeling (BIM). Educated in Architecture at Edinburgh College of Art/Heriot–Watt University and in Landscape Architecture at the University of Manitoba, Jim has a special focus on sustainability issues: daylight analysis, sun studies, lighting analysis, modeling buildings, and conceptual energy modeling (models with shading devices). You can learn more from Jim on his YouTube Channel.