SHEETSHUFFLE gives you a single dialog listing every layout in the drawing, where they can be dragged into order, sorted, renamed, prefixed, suffixed, added, deleted, copied and searched — with everything applied at once when you close it.
What SheetShuffle does
AutoCAD’s own tab handling is one right-click menu per tab. On a drawing with thirty sheets that needs renumbering after a sheet is inserted in the middle, that is thirty right-clicks and thirty typed names, with no way to see the result until it is finished.
Move — Top, Up, Down and Bottom move every highlighted tab at once, keeping their relative order. Reverse reverses just the highlighted tabs. Pref/Suff adds text before and after names, rejecting any change that would create a duplicate. Add, Delete, Copy and Current do what they say. Find is find-and-replace across tab names, one at a time or all at once, with each match shown in context. Reset puts the names and order back to how they were when the dialog opened.
Double-click any tab in the list to rename it.
How to use it
- Load the routine with
APPLOAD, or put it on your support file search path. - Type
SHEETSHUFFLE. - Drag tabs into order, or use one of the three sorts.
- Rename by double-clicking, or add a prefix and suffix in bulk.
- Close the dialog to apply the reordering.
How it works
Three sorting methods, and the third is the one that matters. Alphabetical is ordinary A to Z. Numerical sorts by the numbers inside the names, so Sheet2 comes before Sheet10 rather than after it. Architectural compares the parts of the name in turn, treating numbers as numbers and text as text — so A-101, A-102, A-201, S-101 comes out right.
Both the numerical and architectural sorts work by splitting each name into alternating runs of text and numbers — A-101a becomes ("A-" 101 "a") — then comparing those pieces in step. The numerical sort keeps only the numeric pieces; the architectural sort keeps everything and compares each piece against its counterpart, with numbers sorting before text where the two disagree in type. That is what makes it handle real sheet numbering schemes rather than approximately handling them.
Renaming, adding, deleting and copying happen immediately, because those are what you are watching for. Reordering does not. The list in the dialog is just a list of names; only when the dialog closes is each layout’s TabOrder set from its position in that list.
Reordering tabs one at a time would make AutoCAD renumber every other tab after each move, which is both slow and prone to leaving the tabs in a state nobody asked for.
Every change is inside one undo group, so a whole session of shuffling undoes in one step.
Notes and limits
- Reset does not resurrect deleted tabs or remove added ones. It restores names and order only.
- Tab names cannot contain
< > / \ " : ; ? * | , =— the dialog rejects them, as AutoCAD would. - Model space is deliberately not listed. It cannot be renamed, moved or deleted.
- Use the architectural sort for real sheet numbers. Alphabetical puts A-1011 before A-102.
Download and details
| Name | SheetShuffle — reorder, rename and manage layout tabs from one dialog |
| Download | SheetShuffle.lsp — 69.7 KB, plain AutoLISP source. Downloads directly; no zip to unpack. |
| Type | AutoCAD AutoLISP routine |
| Command | SHEETSHUFFLE |
| Requires | the ActiveX layer (loaded automatically by the routine with vl-load-com); nothing extra — the dialog is written to a temporary file at run time and deleted again, so there is no .dcl to install. |
| Source size | 69.7 KB, 1,561 lines |
| Error handling | Yes — a *error* handler restores every system variable it changed, on cancel as well as on error. |
| Undo | Not needed — this routine only reads the drawing and changes nothing. |
| Compatibility | AutoCAD (any release with AutoLISP), BricsCAD, ZWCAD, GstarCAD, ProgeCAD and other IntelliCAD-based platforms. AutoCAD LT needs a LISP enabler. No .NET, no ObjectARX, no installer. |
| Author | YZ, August 2026 |
| Licence | Free to use, supplied “as is” with no warranty. |
References
- SHEETNUMBER LISP — renumber sequentially once the order is right
- SHEETFILL LISP — fill the title blocks from a register
- SHEETSTRIP LISP — remove matching objects across the set
- More free AutoLISP routines on this site
- Wisey’s Steel Shapes — free structural steel section drawing program