Convert Profile from File or Surface to Profile from Layout

For some unexplained reason Autodesk has decided to prevent you, the user, from changing the profile data source type. This can be extremely frustrating when you want run reports on profiles originally sampled from a surface that is now static, or imported from a file. Or when you want to tie the profile to the alignment geometry changes that where added in Civil 3D 2015.

The easy way to solve this is to use the SincPac’s feature to convert a profile from surface to one by layout.

The harder way is to create a dummy profile by layout. Create a profile by layout and there is no reason to add data to it. Next select the profile you want to convert to a Profile by Layout profile. Instead of creating a new profile when doing the copy, overwrite the profile data.

Now you have a copy of the profile with it being by layout instead of the original source data.