Tom Mansell, an architectural technologist, proposes a solution to a problem when a user needs to duplicate the layer status of one viewport into another.

"This problem is often posed to me by consulting engineers who deal with many different CAD standards and setups from multiple offices. They need to copy layout viewports from one tab to the next, without losing the frozen or thawed layer status. Solution: create a block out of the viewport! Making a block with the Wblock command will make the viewport into a block file that can be inserted into any drawing. Insert it in the new layout, then explode the newly inserted viewport. Voila!"

Notes from Cadalyst Tip Patrol: The Copy command will work just fine to copy a viewport. But if you want to copy a viewport layer state from one drawing to another, that can be a bit more difficult, though there are several ways to get this done. One method is to open the layer manager in the viewport you want to emulate, followed by the layer state manager. Save the current state, then export it. Open the new drawing, activate the proper viewport, open the layer manager and the layer state manager, and finally load the layer state. That is a lot of steps. The above tip reduces the number of steps, and might be easier to accomplish as well.