File currently in use

When a drawing is opened, EFD locks that drawing so it cannot be opened at the same time by another person, it does this by creating a file with the same name as your drawing but with an extension of .EFL (see image below). This locking system is used to stop your drawing from being updated by more than 1 person at the same time because if this happens, changes made by either person would be lost.

This .EFL file is automatically removed when the drawing is closed, so wait for the other person to finish working on the drawing and then open it again.

If another person is not working on the drawing, it might be that yours or the other person's computer crashed while working on the drawing, stopping the .EFL from being deleted automatically.

In this situation, you have 2 options:

1. Click YES to the message above. The drawing will then open for you to edit. IMPORTANT: This will open a copy of the drawing, not the master drawing, so any changes you make will be separate from the master drawing. You will also need to save the drawing with a different name.

2. Click NO to the above message and then delete the .EFL file, you will then be able to open the drawing. IMPORTANT: Please check that another person really is not amending the drawing before deleting this file.

If the above instructions are not working it may be that the .EFL file is being synchronised with a Cloud based system or something similar, in which case the automatically deleted .EFL file gets put back by the synchronisation process causing the issue to remain. To get around this you will need to set your synchronisation system to ignore .EFL files.