If you feel cut off and excluded from projects that use 3-D drawings because you can't view them, or if others on a project can't view your 3-D files because they don't have the CAD software that created them, a new solution could bring you some relief.

Adobe Systems Inc., San Jose, Calif., introduced Adobe Acrobat 3-D Jan 23. It lets people using the free Adobe Reader viewer interact with 3-D models created in a variety of CAD software applications and converted to Adobe's PDF format. Anyone with the Adobe Reader 7.0.7 can view, enter comments, make cross sections, animate and add textures and materials to elements of 3-D CAD drawings, as long as the creator of the original PDF file has enabled those capabilities.

The software also interacts with Microsoft's Word, Excel and PowerPoint programs, so Adobe Acrobat 3-D files can be inserted into their documents. When the Microsoft files are converted to PDFs, embedded 3-D objects can be viewed with Adobe Reader. "The big thing is extending what we've been doing to embrace 3-D content," says Patrick Aragon, Adobe's product marketing manager for Acrobat in architecture, engineering and construction.

Adobe Reader is something "everybody in the construction industry uses," says technology consultant Christian Burger,president of Burger Consulting Group, Chicago. The new product eliminates the old limitation, which was that if you were a contractor, you couldn't view 3-D drawings unless you had the original 3-D software, he says.