A drawing is revised many times during a project life cycle, leading to several versions; managing drawing versions is already difficult, but even more daunting is the task of accurately identifying the changes among them. Side by side comparison of drawings is extremely hard and error prone. If engineers and project managers had the ability to precisely identify differences among various versions a drawing, expensive human errors would greatly reduced, saving thousands of dollars and time during a project implementation.

With Visual Compare, engineering organizations can make design modifications with the confidence that they can be precisely tracked. Among thousands of design objects, Visual Compare can accurately locate newly added, removed and modified objects. Visual Compare provides exact information about any object property modification such as layer, color, location changes, and many more.

Integration of Visual Compare with world’s most popular CAD software AutoCAD, AutoCAD LT* and their vertical software such as Electrical, Civil 3D and Map delivers to CAD engineers the power to produce high quality designs without any fear of accidental changes. Thanks to the built-in drawing viewer, the use of AutoCAD with Visual Compare is optional, providing cost savings to many project managers who only need the ability to review design changes.

The export of compare results to industry’s most trusted format PDF, enables printing and sharing of design changes; PDF is an excellent format to print and share static design data.

Visual Compare can also produce Everest compare package (ECR) to be shared with others. The ECR file format contains both graphical and property changes from the drawings whereas PDF contains only graphical changes. The Everest 2010 Drawing Viewer is able to import ECR packages, enabling reviewers to identify precise changes at no charge.

The functionality of importing and exporting Everest compare package (ECR) has been integrated to Autodesk products such as AutoCAD and verticals, allowing users to pick their compare viewer based on resource availability and needs.

Engineering organizations can maintain designs in version control systems available for free such as Subversion (SVN). Visual Compare integrates with Subversion (SVN) and other commercial version control systems through command line interface.