Last Friday our office finally had the time to roll out the new Autodesk Design Review 2010. If you haven’t upgraded your office to the latest Design Review 2010, I strongly recommend it. Once you open the new viewer you instantly get shell shocked by the new UI (User Interface). While it’s very shocking at first I honestly feel it’s the right app for the Ribbon. After initial launch of the application and an engineer in our office who's never seen the Ribbon it was pretty easy for them to understand the 3 tabs in the Ribbon and haven't had any complaint's yet. While launching the new version is a little slower due to the Ribbon the new features really make it work the upgrade.

While the UI is nice, there is a better new feature to Design review 2010 in my opinion. Yes that new feature, drum roll, the PDF import. Small little addition, but what some may not know is this can really help an office migrate to DWF with or without the users knowing. A little trick is the ability to change the default program that PDF files open up with. One of the biggest gripes from our users is the horrible navigation tools inside Adobe Reader and Acrobat. Mainly that being the real time zooming and panning with the middle mouse button. With this limitation we decided to make Design Review our default application for PDF and DWF. Now the limiting navigation features inside Adobe reader is behind us.

To do this, first locate a PDF on your computer and right click over the PDF and go to “Open With” then “Choose Default Program”.

 

This will launch another dialog box called “Open With” with a browse button on the bottom right corner. Select the “Browse” button and navigate to your C:\Program Files\Autodesk\Autodesk Design Review\DesignReview.exe. After navigating to the Design Review exe, select the OK button, and Design Review should open up, with your PDF file loaded.

 

Now you will notice that a D logo (Design Review Application Icon) will appear on each of your PDF files, designating that PDF files will now open by default with Design review.

 

If you don't want to make the jump to defaulting your PDF's to open in Design Review, you can still open a PDF from inside Design Review. Just chose Open from the big "D" in the top left corner of the application, and change your file types from DWF to Adobe PDF.

WARNING: By defaulting PDF’s to always open in Design Review may cause some issues if your users are trying to save markups and not realizing their PDF’s are being converted to DWF files. However the PDF’s wont be lost, the original PDF remains in tact. It may cause some slight confusion, so explaining that clicking the save button in Design Review will default to .dwf not .pdf. If you need it to be a PDF you need use a print driver such as Adobe Acrobat to print it back to PDF.

As you can see this is a nice way to ease your users into adopting DWF, and if your users are already DWF fans, this might make them not so disappointed each time a PDF file shows up in their in-box.

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