this tutorial on civil 3D data shortcuts assumes you've already got an existing ground surface such as the one you see here which was created in the previous tutorial the purpose of data shortcuts is to allow you to reference Cil 3D objects between drawings it allows us to do things like keep our existing ground surface in one drawing but use it in our design drawing for surface profiles volumes Etc xrfs would allow you to see line workk from another drawing but you wouldn't be able to use it for Cil 3D functionality the data shortcuts allow you to control the style of the EG surface in your design drawing as well as use it for targeting the interface for data shortcuts is in the prospector tab of tool space below the drawing area you'll see data shortcuts the first thing we need to do is set the data shortcuts working folder and the project we'll right click on data shortcuts and say set working folder there's a number of ways you can organize your data shortcuts we're going to assume that we're going to keep the shortcuts right inside of our project so I'll set the working folder one level above my project so the p drive for me and then I'll make a new data shortcut project folder and I'm going to make it exactly the same as my project which is 20161 what that's going to do is set the data shortcut project which is 20161 what that's going to do is set the data shortcut project folder and automatically in that folder structure it's going to create this underscore shortcuts folder which the program needs for the data shortcuts to function correctly you should never put anything in this underscore shortcuts folder uh or do anything to the files inside of it they're just XML files that the program uses to organize the data shortcuts once I've got that set what I'll want to do is save the drawing and then right click on data shortcuts and say create data shortcuts that will allow the existing ground surface we've created to be available to any other drawings that reference this data shortcut project if you don't save first what happens is when I go to create data shortcuts so I'll right click data shortcuts and say create data shortcuts check my EG surface and say okay now underneath data shortcuts you'll see surfaces EG you also notice the other kinds of objects we can create data shortcuts for alignments and then therefore profiles pipe networks and then new for 2017 uh corridors now that that data shortcut has been made available we can close this drawing start a new drawing start by saving it and now we're ready to reference or data reference this EG surface that we just made available so under data shortcuts we'll go to surfaces EG rightclick create reference choose the style and we can change the name if we'd like to and there's the EG surface reference to in now when we look up in the prospector area the drawing area and we go to surfaces you'll see EG but it has a little slightly different symbol little arrow pointing up into the right and that's to alert us to the fact that this is a data referenced surface and if we expand it you'll see there's no definition okay and that's because the definition of this EG surface is actually in another drawing I want to point out a mistake that's commonly made let's say I brought in the wrong surface maybe it's from the wrong project or maybe it's just the wrong surface so I want to get rid of it I don't want to right click under data shortcuts here and say remove removing the surface from the data shortcuts gets rid of the XML file inside of that underscore data shortcuts folder I showed you we want to get rid of it from the drawing so up here under surfaces EG we want to get rid of that so I could either right click here and say delete or I could just select it on the screen and hit delete and that'll take it out of this drawing so I'll bring it back in one more time and save now these two drawings design. DWG and my existing ground drawing are both Associated to this project which means that when I reopen these drawings in two months or a year it should automatically set my project folder to p and the project but I do need to be aware that if I go to work on another project start a new project or a project that hasn't used data shortcuts it may not be set to the correct project down here so you always want to check this data shortcut path and make sure that you're in the project you expect to be in before creating data shortcuts or data references now in the next tutorial we'll take our existing ground surface and begin to create alignments and profiles