How to convert N/E to Lat/Long in Civil3D

Is there a way to convert Northing/Easting to Latitude/Longitude in Civil3D? a Lot of our data was captured as Northing/Easting because the GPS units were set up to match our topo map coordinates.

There are a variety of ways. Can you be more specific on what you want to do?

At the simplest level, you only need to assign a coordinate system to your drawing. Then you'll automatically see Lat and Long in each Cogo Point. Or you can use the Inquiry Tool to pick a point in your drawing and identify the Lat/Long at that point. There's also the Geodetic Calculator, which lets you key in Northing/Easting and see the associated Lat/Long. You can also create Point File Formats that can import/export Cogo Points with Lats/Longs.

I'm new to AutoCAD Map 3D 2011 and GIS, so I hope these questions are not too trivial. Also, we have AutoCAD Map and we're considering upgrading to Civil 3D.

The point data we have for our rail infrastructure records (culverts, road crossings, curves, tangents, etc.) was captured as Northing and Easting using GPS handhelds over the past few years. It's currently in a series of MS Access databases.

Now we're bringing in AutoCAD Map 2011 and Mapguide for GIS and and we would like to bring the MS Access data into drawings that use a NAD 83 Lat/long standard.

My question is: What is the best approach or procedure for bringing these objects from an MS Access database into our drawings as GIS features?

I don't know... I usually use Civil 3D for working with points. I've never tried using Map features for that.

You could always try connecting to your database via the Task Pane, and see what happens.

There's a couple of ways o bring the data into MAP3D, one is with the FDO Data Connect and use the ODBC provider. For this you need to create a ODBC connection in the ODBC Connection Manager in Windows > Control Panel >Admin Tools. The trouble is getting the MS Office drivers to work with it, if you're on a 64 bit OS you need the latest MS Office installed. You can also convert the MS Access Dbase to a SQL database and use that with out creating a ODBC connection.

Second way is to create a CSV (text file) from the db table and use the import point tools either from Civil 3D or MAP3D. Depends on what you want to do with the points afterward as to what one to use.