First make sure that the units of the autocad drawing are same as etabs model units.

2. draw a point by the command "Point" in autocad and at origin, so type 0,0,0 in autocad.
3. Move the entire drawing to the origin. How? Well, use command "move" and move the entire
drawing to the point (0,0,0) made in step 2 above. This will make the origin of autocad drawind and
etabs model match.
4. break all xrefs and blocks into individual elements by selecting the entire drawing and write the
command x and press enter.
5. If you want only grids imported and delete everything in autocad except for the grid and put the
grids in a new layer and save as dxf.
6. Then go to etabs, File-import-import dxf and shwooosh....u have the grids imported. Similarly u can
save different elements in different layers and repeat the above procedure ONE BY ONE IN THE SAME
DRAWING AND IMPORT AGAIN IN THE SAME OPENED UP ETABS FILE.