I recently upgraded my firm's layering standards to use the National CAD Standard system and while it's a wonderful setup from a CAD Manager's standpoint, I've managed to annoy just about all of my staff in doing so. Part of it is just that people are generally resistant to change but some of it is the length of the NCS layer names and, to be honest, how many of them there are. That may sound like small issues but in a high production CAD environment, even the slightest delay in getting things done is strongly frowned upon.

I needed to find a quick and easy way for my staff to control the extensive layer list of the NCS, so I opted to make use of the Layer Filter tool inside AutoCAD.