15 Favorite AutoCAD Tips & Tricks!

welcome to this special edition of the 30 minute workout series my name is jeff bartles and in today's session we're going to be looking at some autocad tips tricks and shortcuts if you're unfamiliar with the 30 minute workout concept we put these sessions together as a way of giving us an opportunity to demonstrate tools and features that aren't covered during traditional training courses our goal with these sessions is to have an opportunity to talk about some of these tools to help shorten up the learning curve for folks and allow them to make the most of their autodesk investment we do have some ground rules with the sessions first of all the examples that we show very often can be abstract in nature and we do that on purpose this way we can focus solely on how a tool works once you understand how the tool works you can apply it in whatever situation works best for you these sessions are always recorded so you don't have to worry about taking notes anyone who has registered for the session will get access to the recording if you have questions during the session go ahead and put those in the q a pane we will answer those as the session progresses in the event we don't get to all of the questions by the end of the session we will get back to you with an answer as far as the agenda goes for today we're going to be talking about a lot of things when i started setting the agenda i started asking myself you know if i had a half an hour to talk about autocad features that i can't live without you know what would they be and as i started writing these things down i quickly got to about eight pages worth of content so what i did was i organized things into four major categories we're gonna be talking about as many things as possible today i've got them organized into the interface category maybe looking at traditional commands using untraditional approach we'll also be looking at some new commands the my goal with this session is to show you some things some tips and tricks that maybe you haven't seen before and then at the end of the session i'm going to be sharing some additional resources as always this is going to be a powerpoint free zone we'll be working live in the application for the duration of our time together today okay now that our housekeeping is done let me drop out of this if you look at the top of the screen you can see that i am working in autocad 2022 today since this is an autocad tips and tricks session having said that if you are a civil 3d user everything that we look at here today will apply in civil 3d as well because civil 3d is built on top of autocad one more thing even though i'm using the 2022 version if you are using a slightly older version not a problem the majority of the things in fact all of the things that we look at today have been around for a few years so everything should work just fine for you so the first tip i'm going to select some items here if you select items and then click the top hot spot on the view cube it will focus your attention on those items we're going to talk about some interface items first and we're going to talk about the quick access toolbar quick access toolbar is located here at the top of the screen quick access toolbar contains tools that are so important that we have to have them on screen all the time there are some favorites in here there's the new command open save save as did you know if you click this fly out at the end of the quick access toolbar we can see toggles that control the display of the items that are currently here notice there are additional commands that we can add to the toolbar right from this menu if you're a civil 3d user you probably notice that there's no workspace selector up here that's because it happens to be turned off if i wanted to turn that on i could click to bring that up and now you'll see that this function is very similar to how we have it in civil 3d having said that we really don't need the workspace selector up here in civil 3d and autocad there is also a gear down here in the lower right corner if i open that up i can select workspaces from here as well let's look at how we can turn that workspace item off i'm going to expand that menu again and i will click to remove this toggle now before i do that let me mention that the list of items that we see here is obviously not a comprehensive list of all the tools available in the application so when i close that let's look at how we can add additional tools to the quick access toolbar all you have to do is right-click on a command in the ribbon and in the right-click menu there's an option here add to quick access toolbar so i just added the circle command to the quick access toolbar not only the circle command itself but it also brought the fl the flyout along as well very easy for me to add those and you know i can add any command i want up there and have it available on screen all the time if you're like me once you add items to the quick access toolbar you may be asking yourself how can you remove them from that if i right click on the toolbar i can choose remove so very easy now we can add not just commands we can also add interface items there's a very popular tool here on the ribbon it's our layer drop down very often we use this to set our current layer or we can select an object and change the layer that it's sitting on really nice tool however if i jump to a different tab and i want to use that tool i've got to come back to the home tab to find it if however i right click on that interface item notice i can add this to the quick access toolbar as well so now anytime i need this tool i can come up here and access it from the top of the screen i'm going to go ahead and press escape and then we'll put things back the way they were i'm going to right click on this and choose remove from quick access toolbar to take that away so that is the quick access toolbar let's pan this over and we'll talk a little bit about the application menu the application menu is this letter in the upper left corner if i click to expand this in the menu we'll find many of the same commands that we also find in the quick access toolbar i show you this menu to show you the search area at the top of the screen we can use this to search for commands as an example i'm going to type plot when i do autocad or civil 3d will show you every place in the interface where that command can be found and if i roll my mouse wheel down you can see not only is it going to show me where plot can be found but it'll show me where any command associated with plot is located and if i keep scrolling down you can see it'll find commands that are even loosely associated with plot let's scroll back up based on what we see here we can see the plot command can be found in the quick access toolbar there it is right there it can also be found in the application menu we saw that a second ago when we expanded this and then plot is also located in the ribbon on the output tab in the plot panel now if you want to you can take and navigate to those locations but it's nice to know that these items in the list actually work as hyperlinks as well if i click i can launch the command from here let's close this i show you that because as we run through the session today i may talk about commands and rather than having to remember which tab and which panel i'm going to to find the icon i'll give you the command and then you can use that feature that we just looked at to locate the icon if you want it let's pan this over we'll talk for a second about palette management i am a single monitor kind of person but still the palettes in civil 3d and autocad are quite large i like to free up as much real estate as possible for my drawing let's look at how we can do that one palette that i use frequently is the properties palette and in the civil 3d platform typically it's found on the home tab over here on the left side since we're in autocad today i'm going to go to the view ribbon tab and we'll find the palettes panel here very similar to turn on the properties palette i can click the icon to toggle that on let's go back to home another way we can access this palette is by pressing ctrl 1 that will turn it on and off so i like to use this palette for everything whether it's autocad or civil 3d why go to 10 different dialog boxes when i can select an object then i can change its properties using a single dialog box as an example i'll select this circle and i'll change the radius of that circle to 0.25 so i like having this palette on screen all the time what i'm going to do is right click on this vertical bar this is called the mast from here i can choose anchor left or anchor right depending on the side of the screen you want to use i'll choose anchor left when i do you can see it shoves that palette over into the margin now if i select an object i can simply come over and hover over the margin to open this up i can then make a change let's set that radius back to 0.5 when i'm finished i move away it collapses and i've got all my screen real estate again now i can take this step a little bit further if i right click on the margin i can choose icons only this will reduce the pallet down to a single icon in the interface that means if i select an object now i can just come over and hover over this icon get access to the tool maybe we'll change the rotation of this text to zero when i'm finished with my business i can move away and the palette collapses i'm doing this with the properties palette but you can do it with any palette in the simple 3d or autocad environment if i open the layer properties for instance this is a palette i'm going to right click on this and say anchor left or right remember we could do this on either side of the screen we'll push that over i could type uh xref our external references manager is a palette i'm going to right click on this and choose anchor left now i've got a ton of functionality i can add more things if i want but i've got a ton of functionality available here just hovering over these individual icons all right let's slide this over and we'll talk for a second about selection cycling when you install civil 3d or autocad very often the selection cycling feature is turned off and in some cases it's kind of hidden let's look at where we can turn it on in the lower right corner of the screen is an icon that allows us to do some customization it's affectionately known as the hamburger i'm going to click this and when it pops up you can see toggles that show you all of the tools that are visible down here in the status bar so using this we can turn various items down at the bottom of the screen on and off in the list i can see an item here called selection cycling i'm going to click to select that and each time i toggle this you can see the see the thing open up there's the icon for it right there once i enable the icon down there in the interface i'm going to click to close that menu and then just like the other items down here you can click this to toggle the feature on and off i'm going to turn it off momentarily and then we'll explore how this works i'm going to start by stacking up these rectangles i'm going to use the move command here for a second i'll select this rectangle pick it up from here and place it here i'll tap my spacebar to relaunch the move command spacebar or the enter key can be used to relaunch the previous command now that i've stacked those up let's assume that i wanted to move the green box or the green square if i come up and launch the move command or any command that asks me to select objects when i go to click here it is always going to grab the one on top which makes it challenging in the event i've got multiple objects sitting on top of each other that's where the selection cycling comes into play i'm going to come down and turn that feature on control w is the toggle that you can use another alternate way to turn that on and off when selection cycling is turned on i can launch the move command or any command that's going to ask me to select objects now when i put my cursor over this pile if you will you can see the icon changes and when i click it'll say well hey these are all the items that we found under your cursor pick the one you want i'm going to grab the green one in this case and press enter and i'll pick it up from the end point here and maybe we'll put it over here maybe i'd like to offset the yellow rectangle i'll come up and launch the offset command my distance i'll type 0.15 which object do i want to offset i'll come over here and click since selection cycling is on it finds all the objects under my cursor i will grab the yellow one and we'll offset this to the outside so selection cycling great tool for making selections when you have multiple objects in the same vicinity let's come down and turn that off let's talk about an object snap that doesn't get a lot of air time that is from i like to use the from object snap when i'm placing details on a on a detail sheet for a set of construction drawings works great for that from allows you to place objects based on a point other than where you picked it up from let me show you what i mean i've got a rectangle here let's say this represents the boundary of a detail maybe i'd like to copy this to the right and ultimately i'd like to place it such that it's 0.25 away from this first one let's launch the copy command and i will select this rectangle enter i'll pick it up from this corner you can see where i'm holding it from well now to get that .25 away i might have to create some sketch geometry or something like that in fact i can do it with this object snap instead i'm going to shift right click and i will say from i would like to copy this from the end point here now it's like i picked it up from that location i will then come down and turn on my ortho or i could tap f8 to do that and i can then drag the right and i'll type 0.25 my distance now i'm still in the command maybe i'd like to copy one down below a distance of 0.25 let's shift right click and we'll say from i'd like to create a copy from this lower left corner my ortho is still locked i'll pull this down and type 0.25 and press enter and then i'll press escape when i'm finished that is the from object snap let's look at some hatch options maybe i'd like to hatch the area inside this boundary i'll come up and launch the hatch command and i would like to hatch this using a brick pattern so in the contextual ribbon i'll open up the pattern menu and i'll come down and find one of these patterns that starts with ar the ar represents architectural i'll choose this one architectural brick standard i'll select that pattern and then i will click inside this shape now when i do since these are architectural they are scaled for architectural use so from a civil perspective if this was a civil drawing this pattern is going to be quite large i need to make this smaller so in the contextual ribbon i'm going to change this to 0.1 and i'll press enter and then i will click the check or i can press enter it again to get out of the command now this looks nice however if we look at it closely if this was to represent the elevation view of a wall or the outside of a building chances are the bottom course of bricks wouldn't be this small when you create hatch in the autocad platform the hatch is based on the coordinates of your origin zero zero so if i would like to have this bottom course of bricks look correct all i have to do is move my origin to the bottom left corner of this object now i could do that at the point i create the hatch or i can edit this one if i select the hatch it brings up the contextual ribbon from here i could just choose set origin and i can grab the lower left corner the hatch is now built from that corner and i'll go ahead and press enter when i'm finished this is a great feature to use when you're working with state plane coordinates if you've ever placed concrete hatch and you're working with state plane and you're out in the millions since that hatch pattern is being essentially drawn from the zero zero coordinate sometimes hatch can look broken or the end points don't touch how do we correct that all we have to do is move the hatch origin closer to the object or on the object itself here's another hatch option maybe i would like to hatch the area inside these individual line segments if i launch the hatch command i'm going to go with a solid fill hatch in this case we'll click solid and then typically default when we go to hatch it's pick points if i move my cursor inside this area that's almost what i want the problem is i've got a bunch of circles that are blocking my my path there if we look in the upper left corner you can see that i can place hatch using the pick points option or select objects unfortunately neither of these work very well select objects would only work if i had a nice closed object that i could click on in this case i don't have that i show you that to show you this if i expand the boundaries panel notice right here for the boundary set this says use current viewport it's essentially looking at everything in the file if i come over and click this icon i can choose a new boundary set and then the objects that i select is essentially i'm telling autocad these are the only objects you're allowed to see when i do pick points i'll grab those four objects and now when i place my cursor in here you can see that it it finds that very quickly i'm going to click to select that location and then we'll use the contextual ribbon here to put a different color on that when i'm finished i'll close okay this is a great tool to use in the event you've got a drawing that has thousands and thousands of entities sometimes when we're trying to pick points with hatch it can try and examine all of those entities and it can be a drag on performance so this can be a quicker way to place hatch in drawings like that just select the boundaries at a time let's talk about the geometric calculator phenomenal tool i can't live without it used to have a calculator on my desk don't have to have that so much anymore because we can let the application do the calculating for us as an example i'm going to type cal here at the command line for calculator when i do you can see it says expression i can now type in an expression i'll type two plus two for instance when i press enter we can see the answer there is four you can type in expressions that are as simple or as complex as you want the nice thing about this calculator is that you can launch it within another command as an example maybe i would like to draw a circle that is half the diameter of this one i'll launch the circle command i'll pick a point on screen i will come down and choose diameter now what's my diameter apostrophe cal the apostrophe allows us to run the calculator transparently within the current command when i hit enter i can see my ability to enter the expression so i'll type 1.34 divided by 2 and when i press enter you can see it calculates that value and it completes the circle if i was to put a quick dimension on there we can see that's half the diameter maybe i would like to scale this rectangular shape such that its sides equal 1.34 i'm going to come up and launch scale i'll select the shape and press enter we'll scale it from the lower left corner now what's my scale factor i don't know let's let the computer figure it out apostrophe cal enter what's my expression 1.34 divided by 1.5 i'll press enter you can see that it was scaled perfectly in fact if we look at the command line you can see that anytime you use the geometric calculator it is calculating the value to 14 spaces to the right of the decimal that is as accurate as it gets now we can use with the geometric calculator we can use text or numbers if you will we can also use object snaps so we can use this to calculate locations in space maybe i would like to place a circle that is centrally located between these three points i'm sure you'll agree that each of these from an object snap perspective could be looked at as either an endpoint or an intersection so just to demonstrate i'll use one of each during this during my expression to place a circle centrally located i will launch the circle command and then it says where do you want to place it we'll let the computer figure it out apostrophe cal expression i'll type end i'll type open bracket first end plus end plus int we'll do an intersection so i'd like to take those three coordinates close bracket so those three object snaps and take that quantity divided by three and i'll press enter now it's saying okay which object snap represents your endpoint i'll click this one which object snap represents your next endpoint i'll pick this one which object snap represents your intersection i'll pick this one it adds those three coordinates together and divides by three we can do something similar if i just wanted to find the center of this square i could draw a circle where do i want to draw that from apostrophe cal what's my expression we'll take the quantity of the endpoint object snap plus the other endpoint object snap divided by two and then i will click this endpoint and this one to find the center if you've been using autocad or civil 3d for a while you may have noticed if i shift right click we have an object snap that will do that as well midpoint between two points in addition to using object snaps the geometric calculator also has predefined functions let's look at one of those here i have a line segment that's been offset a certain distance i don't even know what this distance is maybe i'd like to offset this line the same distance that these two lines are apart i'll try that we'll go to offset what's my offset distance apostrophe cal my expression i'll type d-e-e stands for distance between two endpoints i'll click this end point and this one it calculated that distance to 14 spaces to the right of the decimal i can now select the object i'd like to offset and offset it that distance these two objects have the exact same offset as these two we can even use these functions in an expression for example i've got two segments here maybe i'd like to offset this and find the center line i'm going to go back into the offset command what's my distance apostrophe cal expression d e e divided by two enter i'll pick this endpoint and this one it finds the distance divides it by two i can now select my object and choose the side to offset i just created a perfect center line for that without having to take any measurements or create sketch geometry another function that i use frequently is the rad function red will allow you to extract a radius from an existing arc polyline or circle as an example maybe i'd like to fill it these two lines using the same radius as this circle i'll launch the fillet command i'll come down and choose radius what's my radius apostrophe cal what's the expression rad for radius i'll press enter and then i will click the object to extract the radius it pulls that to 14 spaces to the right of the decimal i will then click these two objects to apply my fillet i could include that rad function into an expression as well now we did an entire 30 minute workout just on the geometric calculator in the description for this video will be a hyperlink to that session if you're interested in more about this particular feature let me drag this over want to make sure you're aware that you can enter expressions in your dialog boxes as an example here let's go to annotate and i'll choose the text style dialog box so virtually any place that you have the opportunity to enter a number in civil 3d or autocad you can enter an expression here's the syntax that we would use let's say equals 1 divided by 12 maybe i'm calculating the height of 1 inch for instance equals 1 divided by 12 and then all i have to do is press alt enter to complete that calculation okay we'll work with virtually any numeric dialog box so keep that in mind no sense doing the manual calculations for that let's talk about some selection options we'll look at select similar here if i hover you can see i have a polyline and this polyline was drawn on layer det ii let me just hover over this that was drawn on layer center for some reason my tool tips not popping up at the moment so i've got a polyline drawn on layer center i've also got some additional polylines that were drawn on that same layer i would like to select all the polylines on that layer if i select one of these objects and right click in the menu is an option here called select similar when i choose that you can see that it very quickly selects all similar objects now how similar do they have to be let's look at this select similar is actually a standalone command i'll type select similar down here at the command line and you can see that you can access the settings for this if i choose settings you can see this is how similar they have to be if i select the object it's going to look at that object type so all polylines that are on that layer that have the same color that's how mine is currently set and you can go through and dial this up to whatever you like i'm going to click ok so since i'm also looking at color i could force these two just for the sake of science here i'll just force these two to be red and that would mean if i do a select similar now if i select this object and right click it choose select similar it's only going to find these two these two are polylines that are on that layer that have the the same color their their bilayer these are unique that they're forced to be red that is the select similar option i did that with polylines but you could do it with any object when the select similar feature came out there was another selection or another creation method that was offered at the same time didn't get as much airplay that is called add selected not the best name best name for that would have been create similar because that's what you do you select an object i want to create an object similar to this one on my screen here i've got a dimension and this particular dimension is made from a specific dimension style it's sitting on a specific layer you can see that i've got layer 0 set here currently if i select this object we can see it's on layer det6 i'd like to create another object just like it if i right click i can come down and choose add selected otherwise known as create similar i'll choose that and not only to set the layer for me it launched the appropriate command for me all i have to do is click the two end points and i just created a dimension that's got the exact same properties as the one that i selected and we could do this with anything i could select this polyline for instance right click add selected i.e create similar it launched the polyline command for me and now the polyline that i'm drawing happens to be on that same center layer and it's forced to be red just like the original let's drag this over we'll talk about the ability to double double-click edit you're probably aware if we double click on text we can edit that we've been able to do this for a while in the autocad platform i show you that just to let you know that there are other places where we can double-click edit dimensions is one this is something that in the last few years we've been able to do but prior to that it wasn't quite so easy as an example if i double click on this dimension you can see i get access to that dimension text now this is an associative dimension so i don't want to override that number i'm just going to use my arrow key to get to the end of the line there and i'll press enter and then i'll type maybe a typ for typical or row for right away or something like that very easily i can add a prefix or a suffix to my dimensions just by double clicking on them i can edit blocks with the double-click option i've got a north arrow here if i double-click on that now i only have one block in this file but you can see it selects that block from the list and if i click okay it'll take me right into the block editor okay very quick way to edit blocks i can edit polylines with double click i've got a polyline here if i double click you can see down the command line that it launched the p edit command now if i select this for just a second notice that this polyline is sitting on a layer called hidden that hidden layer has a hidden line type assigned to it notice the line type is not displaying on this object i'm going to fix that i will double click on this to launch the p edit command and then there is a feature under p edit called line type generation if i select that and then enable it by clicking on it will force that line type to span the entire object regardless of the length of the individual segments so that is double click editing now let's talk about the oops command this is a good command that you can protect yourself from yourself if you've ever done this before maybe you've zoomed in and you've been doing some close-up work in a file for instance and then maybe you accidentally did something didn't realize it i just deleted that shape let's say that's a property line maybe i didn't even notice that i did that and then i continue working in here i continue generating content i um you know draw some line segments and at some point when i zoom back out i realize oh no my my boundaries gone well what happens then well i could go through the undo history until it comes back but then i lost everything i did you know for the last 10 minutes or however long i've been drawing since it was deleted there is a command called oops if i type oops and press enter oops will restore the last object that was deleted or erased so that's something you can try in the event you have an issue isolate objects this is a phenomenal command this is one of my favorites works fantastic in autocad and civil 3d this is how you can simplify what you see on screen as we get to more complicated designs we start having more entities and things like that if i come down to the lower right corner we'll find the isolate objects button if i click that i can choose isolate objects and then i can select the objects will say that maybe i'm going to be working on and it doesn't matter what layer okay i'll select the ones i'm interested in when i press enter it will isolate just those objects on the screen and that is independent of the layer settings so very very nice way that i can get this down to just things i'm working on you can't do this with save layer states now this is object based in that layer based now i can take and work make adjustments do what i need to do and then when i'm finished you can see this icon is lit up showing us that i have objects that are isolated if i click that i can choose end object isolation i can also choose to hide additional objects if i want to let me choose end object isolation now you don't have to worry about that particular tool if you if you were to save the drawing while things were isolated it will revert back to the original unisolated state let's drag this over and we'll talk about one more we are dangerously close to the top of the hour here let's talk about who has if you are working in a collaborative environment and you're sharing drawings that are on a server one of the things you may run into is you may open a drawing and it may come up and say this is read only why is it read only because somebody else is in it doesn't tell you who's in it but it's just saying hey you can't work on this somebody else has got access to it and what do you do you end up starting having to make phone calls are you in my file who's in the file i need to work on this file there's a command in the autocad platform also works in civil 3d called who has if i type who has and hit enter this feature works just like the open command so i would navigate my server to the particular drawing that i'm interested in i'm going to select the drawing that i'm currently in by the way we'll select this and when i click open it'll tell you who's in the drawing and i can see the name of their computer as well and i can see how long they've been in the file just in case somebody's camping out in there at least now i know i can make a phone call hey do you really need that file can you get out of that i've gotta continue working okay let me drop back out to my slides here we talked about a bunch of things today i hope that during our session we ran across some things that maybe you hadn't seen before let me go to my additional resources here for a second if you're not familiar with what we do we do have a civil immersion blog i will have the link for that down in the description for this video this is where we post a lot of the content the tutorial content that we post online on a regular basis each of us that is responsible for the civil immersion blog has our own youtube channel where we post hundreds and hundreds of videos how-to videos that show folks how they can take advantage of the different tools that autodesk offers for civil infrastructure this is the url for my youtube channel i'll have that down in the description and then if you're if you like the 30 minute workout concept i will leave a link to the playlist such that you can access all of the prior recordings with that let me say that in the event we haven't gotten to all the questions at this point we will get back to you with an answer on behalf of jerry bartle's angel espinosa alan gilbert and myself i want to say thank you so much for attending these sessions we we really hope that you find value in them and we look forward to seeing you guys again at the next 30 minute workout thanks

Channel: Jeff Bartels

Views: 237,239

Keywords: bartels, akn_include, Autodesk, AutoCAD, tips, tricks, shortcuts, 2022, tutorial, learn

Id: 3z4rySkjJAk

Length: 31min 50sec (1910 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 27 2022