AutoCAD Dos and Don’ts | AutoCAD Tips and Tricks

welcome this is the do's and don'ts of AutoCAD my name is Adam Dirac I've been doing I own a drafting and design company in upstate New York and I've been using AutoCAD for 13 plus years and these are just some of the tips and tricks that I've learned for myself and my company that helped me kind of streamline things the biggest thing for me is efficiency I love efficiency the more you know quickly I can do something the better more money you make really but but you know it's sometimes doing tedious things over and over again gets old so some of these tips and tricks are to showcase how I get around that so I'm gonna be switching back and forth between this and AutoCAD but most of the time I'm going to be in AutoCAD quick disclaimer this presentation is really just the bullet points if you really want to have like a step by step of what we're doing in the class that class handouts going to be the best way to do that I have everything written out they're a little bit more detailed and I'm probably you know for times sake I'm going to be going through some of these items a little quicker and to try and focus on the ones that really made an impact with me so if you have any questions too we can keep those to the end and then I'll I'll answer those the best I can at the end I might go just a minute or two over but I have it pretty dialed in but I want to make sure that I get everything covered so without delay I'm going to get started the first thing is little tips and tricks that'll make your CAD life run smoother these I'm gonna just again this is kind of the way the presentation looks it's got our bullet points and for times sake and when I just jump right into these do open your template file automatically how many of you when you see AutoCAD or when you open up AutoCAD for the first time you get this splash screen and then next thing you see is just a blank thing if you've ever had if you've ever had this it's fine you know for the first couple hundred times that you open a bottl CAD but after a while you know you want to see it go a little bit faster maybe open right up to your template there's a quick and easy way to do that if you right-click on your shortcut for AutoCAD and go into the properties there is a thing called a target and this is what what is highlighted here and because it's really small here I've put it into a notepad file so you can see what's going on and by default this is what the target looks like you have your you know basically the location of the a CAD Exe file and then the product and the language of its in and what you can do is you can actually edit what happens when you open and I've just got two things in here that I've put in but there's there's a whole syntax of many things that you can do these are the ones that are most useful for me so right after the US x our quotation mark I put a forward slash no logo /t for template and then I put the location of my template file so now when I open up AutoCAD and when I'm done I when I'm done setting this up which this one's already set up I just click OK and now when I select my AutoCAD it's going to open up without that splash screen and it opens up right to my template file so I can get right started I don't know if it's that much rest I haven't actually put a stopwatch to it but in my mind it seems a little bit faster so just a quick trick that I've used so I'm gonna be using AutoCAD 2018 today we have a subscription so we get the latest and greatest so and I'm gonna be using the full version so that this a lot of these tips work for a light but the full version is really the one that I use alright do use the burst command don't use the explode command only sometimes how many of you have ever exploded a block that has an attribute definition in it does it kind of look like the bottom one here where you go wait all this text that I just entered in there has now gone back to these attribute definitions auto cad has come out with they have express tools and we're gonna go over some other ones a little bit later but in their express tools they have a command called burst and when I type that in these are two identical blocks at the top I'm just going to select the one burst it the only thing that a little tweak here was this which I can just stretch and make bigger and what burst does is it explodes block but it keeps all of your text that you've entered so it's a really handy thing when you want to to keep that and and not lose it I'm going to be I am jumping around a little bit that's the way this goes so if you miss out on one just focus on the other one and should be good to go do use the purge command the purge command is a great command to use when you're trying to clean up your file if you have a lot of extra stuff if you've you know worked with other people's files like say you go to a manufacturers website and you download a whole bunch of files for like sinks or whatever it's your whatever you're using you can copy that information into your drawing but it's going to bring in their layers if you have any text styles it's going to bring in all that stuff into your file unless you change it first so the purge command is a good way to just clean up your file I use it when I'm done with every file as soon as I'm done and I'm ready to move on to the next job I'll use the purge command to just make the file size just a little bit smaller and the way you and the command for it is simply purge or you can do pu this dialog box comes up and you have some options you can purge blocks there's a whole bunch of blocks and every one every one that you see that has a plus sign they're all not being used in the current file so if you purge something from here don't feel like oh my gosh you know I'm gonna lose out on some data this is only purging the stuff that's not being used if you wanted to see what was being used you can click the radio button at the top and it'll show you what you know what you can't purge so basically to run the purge you can do to two things you can right-click and purge all which I would suggest not doing or you can go category by category and purge the items that you want by just right-clicking on the one that you don't want these three here are actually looks like an error to me because they haven't I never set those up so I can right-click on that and hit purge and it'll just purge those three items if I want to do a whole category I can right click and hit purge and do the whole category and go on so on through the whole thing and it just it makes your file size a little bit smaller and and cleans things up do use audit how many people have ever used audit before quite a few of you about half so audit is one of those things you know Autodesk or AutoCAD is a very logical program it's all mathematical based I'm very mathematical you know in my thinking and when something doesn't logically make sense with AutoCAD something's probably an error or there's an error in the file and I use the purge command or the audit command to check to see so if I run the audit command and I'm going to open up my command prompt so you can see it a little bit better use the auto audits right in there I'm gonna hit enter and it's gonna ask me do you want us to fix how do you want to fix any of the errors I'm gonna say yes and it's going through all the objects in the file and it went through and you can see it fixed see if my pointer works it fixed six error or found six errors and fixed six errors so not necessarily too crazy I've run some files that have been really crazy they have like 300 errors in it but one thing that's interesting that I found when you run the audit command is now if I go back to the purge command there's some more things that you can purge so there's some errors I've always had in one of my template files I always get this text error I'm not sure if you guys have seen that before but so between audit and purge you can kind of clean up a drawing erase some of the errors if you're having errors and then keep going if audit doesn't work and purge doesn't work there's another feature it's kind of like you know bring it in the big guns it's called its use recover recover is a way to check a file if you've ever how many people have ever had AutoCAD crash on you if you've ever had that happen and then you go to open up the file that you were working in and it says you know there are errors in these files that cannot open chances are AutoCAD is gonna say hey why don't you use the recover command so this there's a way you know that's kind of like automatically prompted but there's a way to do it with the command and you just type in recover and what it does is it opens up a dialog box that's kind of like just like your normal open one and then you pick the file that you want to recover and hit open and it does a check this recovery window comes up and it goes through and it kind of does a thorough check of the file to make sure that there's no errors and this one's probably gonna come up out what came up with the six I don't think I saved the last one so it's it's very similar to audit but it can go through a little bit thoroughly more thoroughly and correct any issues so now if your drawing doesn't open with the recovery command that's it that's another story the last thing in this topic is do subscribe now an Autodesk did not make me put this in here so I've been using AutoCAD for 13 years I think I purchased it back in 2008 and that was when they had perpetual license where it just keeps going and you pay a certain amount every year if anybody in here has a perpetual license and you're still subscribing don't stop because now they have it so that you pay per year but it's a little bit more than what you're paying now so the other thing that I have found as a benefit to subscriptions is you get the support so if you have a issue with something you can email them and they'll get back to you and you can install AutoCAD on two machines that you know one office machine and one mobile machine or home machine so I have stuff in my handout that I have stuff in my handout that kind of gives you some more benefits to subscriptions and some knowledge and also where you can get the latest and greatest I'm gonna go I'm gonna come back to the subject a couple of times as I'm showing you some other features because you know because we're on subscription we get the latest version every year and there's been some milestone years where you just get a plethora of more features that are that are great time-saving ones all right oops it's fun to get the hang of switching back and forth all right next category or objective I think is what we're calling it is more efficient ways to accomplish everyday tasks I got a lot of lot of stuff in this one and now let's get right into it oh did I miss one oh we did I missed one on the last one and I'll go over it quick this is not autocad related do sleep on it this is a brain thing I have found this to be very useful if you've ever had a problem that's super complex and you can't figure it out the day before I don't know if anybody has done this in here but if you go to sleep and you wake up the next day I guarantee you'll probably figure that out in 15-20 minutes I've done this probably 30 or 40 times and what it is is your brain actually will work on the problem while you sleep and when you wake up the next morning you'll have a gamut of solutions for it so I didn't want to skip that one that's that's one that's really helped me alright now next to the next category do right click on your DWG tab so in 2015 I think or 2016 AutoCAD introduced these drawing tabs which you can see I'm kind of tabbing back and forth and this is a way that if you have like 10 drawings open you can see them all right there instead of doing ctrl tab or going up here to the window drop-down to switch into different current drawings you can do it all with these tabs the other thing that's nice about them is you can organize them so if you have you know I don't know if you've done this before I've done it a lot with the older version you'd open up all these files and you want it to alt tab in a certain sequence but you couldn't do it or ctrl tab in a certain sequence well now you can organize these drawings you can put them put them right in the order that you want and keep going another thing that's really beneficial is if you right-click on it you have a whole bunch of options for either this specific file or all the files that are open and you can save all of them or save this one you can close all of them or close just this one but the two features that I found most beneficial with this is the bottom where you can copy the file location or you can open right to the folder or location of where the DWG is located this has saved me many times of having to go and try and figure out you know I saved a file in the wrong spot or something like that or when I'm working with a colleague sending a chat back and forth saying here's the file location this is great you can right-click copy that file location and keep going do use annotate of scaling and don't use standard scaling this is one that I've really benefited from I don't know if anybody in here is still using standard scaling I hope the answer is no but auto-cannon 20 and 2008 they came out with annotated scaling now way back when when I had to when we had to scale drawings but there was a whole like a ratio and a fit chart that you would have to do and basically and the reason for it is so that when you have all of your views on the page you can have you know different scaled views and all the text is the same height that's just kind of a drafting standard so before to do that we would have all a whole bunch of dimension styles a whole bunch of text styles a whole bunch of multi leader styles and each one of those had a different scale to it so that when you de mentioned it would it would change the size of that dimension so when you put it on paper it would be the right height well then they introduced annotate of scaling and basically this eliminates the clutter of your of your template file and it makes it so that you can basically just change the scale in one location and it'll change it as you're dimensioning so if I put it on this scale and type in a dimension it's one size and then if I switch to a different scale and dimension it's a different size but these are still the same dimension styles so if I wanted to switch to a different one it wouldn't screw everything up and now I actually did a class on this a few years ago I have it in the handout I go into much more detail about how to set it up but this is just one of those do's and dont's that have really benefitted my company and hopefully if you're not using it it would benefit yours the next one is do copy and move this is something that I've kind of figured out this year and it sounds really simple but it's something that and it is really simple it's something that I have found when I'm working on more complex projects I always used to get trepidatious about editing or revising something because I would revise it and then go oh shoot did I do that right and then to go either undo to find out what it was and then what I revised it to and so I started just copying and just moving it over but you can't just move it over a random measurement or dimension or unit I move it over a set distance so this is a file that I used when for my business we use our laser scanning technology and so I went and I scanned the room that we were putting no work in and then I had to go through and make it so that you know the drawing was actually editable or not editable look a little bit more cleaner for us to do our drawings in so what I did was this was the original data and then I just copied it over 600 units and I did a little bit of editing here and then I copied it over and each one each time we move it over its refining even more but the nice thing is when I get to the final step over here and I have done this many times I found that I oh shoot I forgot one little thing I mean there's a lot of stuff going on here but and now I can just copy from any one of the steps to get whatever I missed and you can see it and then when you're done if you don't want all this extra data you can delete the stuff that you don't want to see so copy and move if you ever have any something difficult it works great next one is do use sheet sets and then the next one I have after that is don't use sheet sets so not to be confusing but I did a class on this as well and when I did the class I wasn't I didn't have my approach that I have right now and what I found is sheet sets are a way to basically put your drawings into like a database so when you change information in the database it'll update your your drawing file mostly text but you know it'll keep track of your views I have a sheet set that I was going to open and you just type in sheet set I like autocad's command line two I I guess I did spell that right I'm not a very good speller and AutoCAD is great for correcting that oh all right so I'm gonna go into my I just want to give you an idea of what sheet sets are before I go crazy so basically when you open up a sheet set it's a database now if I jump into any one of these pages it's organized this whole job into these pages all of this stuff that you see in gray is all fields data that's populated by the sheet set so if I wanted to drop in another view see here I can go into model tab and drag and drop a view and this is coming from a different location it's it's the sheet set in the background is X referencing stuff and and making it work but it's coming from a different location this tab or this text was all created automatically and it's all linked together so again I have a whole class on this I did a whole hour and a half class so I'm trying to put it into about two minutes but sheet sets are great they're really awesome thing but they're only great if only about one to three people are working on the project we found because my firm is growing that when you start putting more than three people on a sheet set it gets a little hairy because you can only edit the database one at a time and it'll lock somebody out and it becomes counterproductive so I would say do use sheet sets for if it's just a project you're working on or maybe two or three people are working on but don't use sheet sets if you have more than one more than three people working on it and I have a link in the handout to to that class as well if you're curious to learn a little bit more do use fields this kind of goes together with with sheet sets how many people have ever used a field in here so about half of you fields are a pretty pretty cool feature of AutoCAD I don't know if you've ever used Excel or word there's ways to do fields and those but AutoCAD has that functionality as well and this is a drawing that I have hat I have some fields in you can see on the on the geez my there we go the title block thank you you can see on a title block there's some gray areas that that are there so if I type in DWG props you can see I have a whole bunch of of different things here so if I want to change this to maybe today 1114 2017 I can click OK and on all six pages that I have here the date when I hit re re regen will change automatically fields are easily accessed by if you have a text thing doing ctrl F or right-clicking and saying insert field and there's a whole gamut of things that you can play with or mess with in here there's a drop-down so there's there's things that you can get like date and time document size objects there's one that we have that we found out which is really very cool see how the drawing title or the drawing number is thirteen point one we have this directly linked to the to the tab so if I right click and rename this tab to say 13.0 that's going to rename it everywhere that we had that linked so their fields are very powerful and I won't get into exactly where I got that from because of time but and because I'm excited about the next subject not the next one but the one after that do use two monitors I don't know if people in here I'm sure everybody in here is using two monitors if you're not I would buy another one it's well worth it I have four monitors at my office it's great that extra real estate gives you you know the ability to have AutoCAD open on one screen and another program open on the other screen you know I you have PDF program open on the other screen it really makes life a lot easier this is one that I the next one don't forget about action recorder this one is pretty exciting i-i've I've used this more recently than I ever have before and it's really it's really beneficial it really helps boost your speed and productivity how many people in here have ever used action recorder okay so about 30% basically action recorder is very similar to like a lisp routine and lists routines you know you do a command and it runs a series of commands the easier ones you know very easy to have to get the gist of the language it's very easy to create a very basic lisp routine but once you get into the more complicated ones there's a lot more involved so what the action recorder does is it allows you to record a series of actions and basically like play them back to file I have a couple of different so it's found in the manage tab and under record there's a record it says action recorder there's and then there's all of these ones that I have saved so just to give you a quick overview if I hit record right now and I draw a rectangle and I hatched this rectangle and then I hit stop it's gonna ask me to save a name so I'm gonna say au 2017 click OK and now this is saved and now I'm gonna actually move this because I'm gonna hit play and you'll see why so now when I hit play it's going to draw that same rectangle that I just did in the same spot that I just did which that's not really too helpful but what's nice is you have the ability to edit what's going on with this action so right now this is the action it's drawing a rectangle and then this is the coordinates that is putting the rectangle so say I don't really want it to go in this coordinate every time I can right-click on this and I can say I'd like to pause for user input and now this is the size of the rectangle we can leave that the same or we can change that but now that I've hit pause for user input I'm gonna hit play again and it's gonna give me just the crosshair like I was gonna be placing it someplace and now when I place it it's gonna come up with this little playback now I left this I usually have this turned off I left this on just to show you but now I'm going to turn it off cuz it drives me crazy but now I can really put it anywhere and then if I wanted to do pause for user input for the size I can hit play again and it will let me do a size and now it's it's actually zooming to a certain spot which I can fix that later but now you can you can kind of see the benefit of this and this is just a very simple example I to show you a little bit more in-depth example this is and again this is kind of like user imagination I'm sure not too many people are messing with scans like this every day but this is one area that I used it this is a scanned file that comes from that 3d scanner that I use and you can see it comes in kind of all a little crazy the numbers are big there's points everywhere but it comes in its export of the same every single time so what I did was I set up an action for this and I just hit play and it runs through a series of things that I used to do manually like changing the point style and I changed the size and this is something that I just said pause for user input and then it tells me to select and I've added this this message select these points here and it deletes them and now it tells me to select the text and it's going to make the text smaller and that was the first step and now the second step when I hit play and again all I did was I just went through the steps that I normally do and recorded it and then just picked points that I wanted to you know pause for the user input and what that just did was that opened up the block editor it changed the way this this point was and now this file looks a lot cleaner and it was about 15 seconds what used to take me about four minutes so I mean this is a kind of an abstract one but you can really do this was another this was another file that I use this on and it helped me with about a week ago I was making a dynamic block for paneling and this dynamic block had a lot of stretches and moves in it and what you need to do when you do dynamic blocks is you need to when you hatch something that border needs to be pulled to the front so what I had to do is I had a hatch all these and each border I had to make sure it was to the front and after about two I got a little annoyed and was like I don't want to do this for everything so I created an action and it went through the steps for me very powerful feature the other thing that's really cool is these actions that that we make it's just like a command so if I type in a u-2 2017 now it's going to run that action all over again so very cool I would definitely suggest you know if you haven't used that to try it out it's been a benefit for me do use dynamic blocks now I just talked about dynamic blocks now we'll get into a little bit more dynamic blocks are something that I have again in 2008 they came out with these it kind of revolutionized the reusable content approach and what they are are their blocks that you can manipulate and change but yet you keep you keep the same you can change the size but you can then go in and change components inside like hatch patterns and stuff like that this is a file that I used so this is a block you can is totally stretchable for a different size and it keeps all the components equally spaced there's different options for views with dynamic blocks I have a whole class on this as well I would if you are not familiar with dynamic blocks there's something very powerful so these this is just a snippet inside the block editor of what's going on inside and definitely a do for AutoCAD the other that but the thing about dynamic blocks is you don't want to get too crazy about them I when they first came out I went I was doing nuts I was having stretches here and stretches there I would do a whole you know a whole drawing and it was one big dynamic block but I found out that that was not the most efficient way to do things when there was an error or a problem because then you'd have to weed through everything to figure out you know where the error was coming from so what I do now I tell my drafters don't try to eat the elephant in one bite take little bites to get there so I have a make a series of smaller blocks and then we utilize those smaller dynamic blocks to create the whole drawing so very very important to not get too crazy and then again back to the the border of the objects that's our hatched with dynamic blocks because everything stretches and moves I'm just going to close this you want the hatch to move with it and the hatch needs to have a nice border that is associative or the hatch needs to be associative to the border and I found just in my work flow with dynamic blocks that that border needs to be pulled to the front so if you've ever made a dynamic block with hatches in it and then you go through and you stretch and you edit it and the hatches go crazy the reason is because the border is not brought to the front and the quick and easy fix to that is to just bring that board out of the front and rehash it and your and your blocks will work much better do redefine blocks still in the block area but this is a this is one that I have that I found one day I was I was in my tool palettes and I was messing around with with the blocks that were in there and I right clicked and I saw this thing that said redefine and I said what the heck does that mean I kind of knew what it meant but I didn't really understand how I could utilize it and what it is is I've already I've already added the block that's here and just drag and drop it to the tool palette and it'll and it'll create that and if I were to open up a new file and I were to drop this block in this file it's it knows where this block comes from if you right-click on here it'll in the properties it's actually got a path for the source path of where that that block is coming from the way I setup drawing in general or a job is we have a file that's just all blocks and then we have all the all the files for like the rooms that we're working on or they utilize the blocks from that one file so we set up a block file we set up a tool palette that that is directly connected to block file so if there's a major change on a whole job and I have ten people working on it will update the block file and then we'll just go through and you can just just right click on the tool palette and hit redefine so that you know that the block is to the most current for this job so if I if I jump in here and I edit this block to not have these I'm just gonna turn off or delete these lines wait one delete to save and close everything's adjusted here now if I go back into my to file you can see it's still there so if we right-click on this hit redefine it'll update that and make it look crazy I think there was a view yeah I was gonna say I think I have to save this so um save this file oh yeah save the the previous file so I forgot I have to save this file first and once this is saved now when I right-click on this it will redefine and this the the hatches always go a little crazy like this and if I just do regen it the hatches will go back to normal so that's not an issue don't forget to shift when you're using extend or trim command this one is one that I found in a manual one time and I was like wow that's you know it's not something I use every day but it's it's actually pretty cool so if you're using the extend command say I want to extend this line to this to this one I can hit X DX for extend select the line that I want to extend to and then select this one and everything's great but what if I want to trim this one now I gotta get out of this do the trim command and and go do the same thing well if you hold the shift key you can actually trim or extend in either command so they're kind of like two commands that are the same just different names so the shift one will they're the shift will make the make the switch for you do use Express tools Express tools are exciting I think out of a lot of the features that I use in AutoCAD a lot of them are Express tools or a lot of ones that I really enjoy our Express tools and they're found in a couple different locations there is a ribbon that is all Express tools and then there's a fire there's a drop-down if you have your file menu up there and there I would encourage you to just go through this you might find something that really changes ever the way that you work in this express tool thing and I'm going to show you just a few that I have found really saved me a ton of time but these are trying to think of the name these are like not really supported by Autodesk they're kind of like their programmers just kind of made these as hey these are really cool but sometimes they might not work features but they're they're really pretty powerful and sometimes this is where like commands start and then they migrate to the to the main set of commands at all I can do and so express tools I'm going to just open up there's a few that that I use like break line is one if you've ever had to create a break line express tools will do it for you automatically I use the command line I use the command line to do this so much so so we can draw a brake line symbol and basically you can set a scale and you can set an extension and draw two points and it'll automatically create your brake line it just creates a 2d polyline and but it's it's very easy and you can customize what's going on there one that I use more than anything else though is viewport sync this one will sync viewports to each other so I have a file that I want to layout and what I've done is I created a very large viewport into my model space and you can see all the I in my model space I put rectangles around all the viewports that I have and I have set this viewport to the inch and a half scale I'm gonna just go into my model space and make sure that I'm set to inch and a half scale which I am oops and I'm gonna go back to test and with the viewport sync I can draw viewports around these so I have a quick command for drawing a viewports and you can see the one that I just drew you can kind of see the model space like a smaller window of it so now I'm just going through and and dropped in these viewports overtop of the ones and I have the rectangles in there so everything aligns so now that I've done that I can type in VP sync and it's gonna ask me to select the border of the one that I want to sync everything to which is the big one so I'm going to select that and now it's going to ask me to select all the borders that I want to to sync together so when I select all those and right-click you'll see all of them kind of change really quick and now what is that one can't active and now what I've got is I actually have all of those viewports already done this one I I must have missed so these viewports are already done they're ready to go and now what now and that text came in if your model space is set to a different scale then you just have to update the scale but but that's a quick and easy fix so this is a way this is a way that I lay out all my pages now it's super quick it's very efficient and it's all an Express tool another one that's really powerful is if you do 3d stuff you can use a flat it's called the flatten command and that'll take everything that's in Z and flatten it down all right when I get gotta go just a little bit faster till I can get all this done here so do use the isolate command isolate is another one that came out with in 2008 it's one of those commands that if you are editing something that's very complicated and you want to just kind of see one thing the isolate command is is really good to do that you can right click and hit isolate and it'll select just those items and now or you can hide those items if you want do use quick selects how many people have used quick select in here okay so about half of you quick select is one of those commands that really selects things quickly all right guess that's a it's one of those things that once you start using it you'll use it quite quite a lot and the command for it is you can type in quick select or you can do key qsr and it'll bring up this dialog box and in this dialog box it gives you a ton of options I would suggest just going back when you're back in your AutoCAD environment and just going into the command and seeing what this dialog box has to offer there's a lot of things that I II probably don't even utilize the way I could but you can quick select stuff like blocks or dimensions or certain geometry that's with circles say I want to select circles I can pick a color or I can just say I want to just select every circle in the drawing and click OK and every circle that's in the drawing will will automatically select this is great if you want to clean up a file do use select similar this is another one that that is beneficial for you know say I wanted to I'll skip the circle say I want to see what all the dimensions are in here if I have a dimension and I right-click on it there is an option to select similar and you can pick and it'll highlight all the other dimensions that are in the drawing this this you know is looking at properties it's looking at a whole bunch of different features but it's a really great way to select things that you want to edit do use viewports in model space this is something that I don't utilize as much as I should but is is pretty powerful again I'm back to this 3d scan file but this works for 2d stuff as well if you type viewport in model space this same viewport window that you get in paper space comes up and you have the options just like you do in paper space but what's cool with this is you can edit you can edit on one side and see what's going on on the other side so like this is the plan view of the 3d that I have here but when I look at it in plan view I kind of get confused okay which line is which and when I select it here it you can see it selecting in the 3d but again this works say you're working on a large file and you want to just you want to go back or you want to look at a section at the same time you're looking at an elevation you can do the same you can do that 2d work in this as well very very useful when you need it I next category I'm gonna try and button this up here this one is settings that will be catered more to your needs do set up your auto your DWG auto-saves this is probably something that everybody has set up I think it's there by default if you are in just your standard AutoCAD and you type the options or op4 options the options dialog box will come up and under open and save you will see it's got a autosave setting this by default I think is set up I think it's set up for like 10 minutes apart the one thing that we've noticed and it's only certain versions of AutoCAD I think it was 2015 so if you're using 2015 and you don't know this hopefully this will save you losing some work is when you publish drawings this will turn off for some reason and I think they've worked out the bug for 2018 but it's definitely something that you should check from time to time until you know so don't don't check it after your file has been lost forever which we have found out many times so do use the PGP file how many people know what the PGP file is about 30 percent of you okay PGP file is a very cool place once you set it up though you're probably never going to look at it too much anymore the P in the in the handout I have the location where it is it's in your you know users app data roaming Autodesk blah-blah-blah-blah-blah for time sake I just copied it out and I'm gonna show you what it looks like I have it very large I guess that's good because then you guys can see it what this is is this is where AutoCAD is looking for your command shortcuts so I just scroll down a little bit and you can see this area over here is the shortcut for this particular AutoCAD command what's nice about this is you can it's basically like a cheat sheet so you can look through and see if there's any commands that you're currently using that you could just use a shortcut for but all the way at the bottom this is what is cool there's a user-defined command alias so say you have a certain feature of AutoCAD that you use a lot and there's not a really good shortcut for it or say you use a certain command quite a lot that you you know you want to change an existing shortcut to it this is where you do that you go in and I have a lot of commands these ones here are for I have a software that I use that kind of attaches to AutoCAD and these were all commands that I wanted to have shortcuts for so you can edit it here and the way AutoCAD reads this is it reads it from the bottom up so if I were to put in another command here that was you know L is the command for line if I were to put another command in here that was you know L for copy you could really screw with your fellow workers but because it's reading it from the bottom up so that's one thing to keep keep note of if you put a hyphen in front or an underscore it'll go to the default once you've edited this file and again the file location is in my hand out the if you're the DW if the drawing is still open or if your AutoCAD is still open you're gonna want to don't forget to do the re in it command and it's re I n I T and this reloads that file so if you've made edits and changes and you wanna and you want to update those type in rien it type pgp file click OK and now it's ready to go another way that you can do that is just close AutoCAD and reopen it do use Lisp routines and don't think they're too difficult how many people know this is how many people have ever used lists routines okay so about half of you how many people are scared to use lists routines a couple of you how many people know what list have never heard of Lisp routines before okay all right good there so at least most of you know what they are Lisp routines are a series of commands that happen and I'm gonna if you have ever heard of Robert Greene he's like a famous Autodesk University guy he does amazing classes on Lisp routines so if so AutoCAD is run with a command line right I'm not going to get too crazy into programming but it's run with a command line so any command that you enter it'll it'll do it well what if there was you know commands that you wanted to do that that you wanted to like run a series of commands and just to give you an example instead of just talking about it I'm gonna go into a file and I have a lisp routine that when I type H fil it automatically changes my layer to the hatch layer and it automatically fixes or picks this hatch pattern so now if I type patch mal it's going to change the hatch pattern and I do this for you know different materials that we use instead of having to go in and change the hatch pattern i I do it this way works really well I also have one that you know changes this layer to a different layer you know quick quick and easy ones and those those are the ones that I'm talking about you know that those aren't difficult at all basically a list 14 you just kind of get the basic language for it and all the full versions are AutoCAD have this if you type in the di le this dialogue will come out or this this like notepad will come out and you can see I have the defined function or you know de fum and then it gives the command and then it just lists a couple of commands and I can go over in detail again I could teach a whole class on this but I can go into detail for anybody who's more interested in this but I would do some research on it there they're really powerful and you know everyday things that you use that you don't have to think you don't have to think too complex with these things you can you can utilize them for simple easy tasks the next one and we're getting close on time here so I'm going to blow through this last little bit there's not there's not anybody after me for a little bit so I might go over just a little bit but the last part of this is luckily my slideshows not that long all right last part of this is avoid pitfalls and bad habits this one this one is I've kind of like learned these from people who have shared their files with us because we work with about a hundred different clients and they'll send oh use our file and we'll open them up and be very scared sometimes so these are kind of coming from that [Music] the first one is do use paper space don't use model space as your paper space I don't know if anybody in here has ever seen a file that kind of looks like this this is not the way AutoCAD was designed really paper space is got awesome features definitely use them if you see a file like this chances are you should you should run and do use layers idea and don't use just layer zero this is another one that that perplexes me when I open up a file and there's only the layer zero in there Auto AutoCAD has made these layers that help you organize things you can set different ones you can turn them on and off is a very powerful feature layer zero has its place but it's not supposed to be everything do oh yeah this one is do use layer zero and back to the layer zero but then don't use layer zero this is one of those that you know it depends on what you're doing with it layer zero has some cool features that are not too well-known sometimes so if I set this to layer zero and I make this a block so it's a layer zero rectangle I'm gonna make this a block I'm gonna say test and okay and so now it's a block if I were to change this to a different layer because it's in layer zero it's going to take the properties of whatever layer I change it to so this kind of gives you a little bit of flexibility when you're creating blocks to to utilize that layer zero if you're planning on exploding this block in the future though it's going to go back to layer zero so you're going to want to not use that if that's the case almost done here there's one more that's very exciting to to demonstrate next one after this do don't edit your template file if you guys have ever edited a template file I don't know if you have or not maybe can't you know because I'm managing everything I do it quite often but it's kind of nerve-wracking because everything is pinching off of your template file and I used to get a little you know anxious about okay what if I screw something up and what I found is and it sounds pretty simple but instead of editing your template file I just open up a new file get it working the way I want it to work and then once all the bugs are worked out save over that template file and I would always copy and have a backup of it this one is don't hit that button back to annotate of scaling there is a button and it is down here and I'm going to open up my drawing file that showcases this very nicely if I select this button right there I want you to memorize what this looks like because it's horrible so it's this middle one right there what every training I do for my drafters I go over this is if you don't remember anything don't this is one too to remember so if when I select this what it says is it adds scales to annotated objects when a scale is added to the file so this thought nothing happened everything fine these these are all still dimensions everything's good okay well I guess that buttons not so bad but when I change the scale to say this one that happens and it's very scary especially if the drafter that's doing this doesn't know what's going on and saves it and closes it and says can you can you look at this because then it's then it's awful so that button is I really don't know what it's for but but it's really one to avoid and I found out recently I was talking to one of my CAD managers and they didn't have this before but you can actually click this little three the three little dashes in the bottom right hand corner of the screen and you can turn that button off so I would suggest doing that and the last one couple ones are just good practice this one's easy do do use logic when you're setting up your DWG file garbage in garbage out do use multi leaders don't use leaders there is a difference between those two leaders are what we used to use many years ago and they kind of look like this very you know it's it's a string em text and then this leader multi leader is kind of combined but one of the things that's nice with the multi leaders is you can you can like if I had a series of leaders together and I want it to put them all in a row I would have to either start that way I couldn't edit it after the fact very quickly but with multi leaders I can select them all and going into my initative area and I can select line up select one and they all can align hopefully most people are not using multi leaders but they're definitely the thing to use you can still use leaders but and then I think the last one I have is do use or don't use only lines use polylines and closed polylines this goes back to my hatch hatching issues but it also goes back to just AutoCAD good practice whenever I get a drawing that's just lines I yell at people this one over here is a rectangle and when I grab this corner and move it the hatch moves with it this one here is that same size rectangle or square but these are strong with lines and if the border moves that the hatch doesn't move with it polylines they really make it easy to edit and change and move and highly suggested alright and I will go back to the slide show for this little bit last thing is if you thank you very much for coming to the class and hopefully this was informative I have contact information here and I'm a handout if you have any questions I'd love to help you and if you would please fill out the form survey this is how I get good feedback to see whether or not I'm doing good or not hopefully this was interesting for you and thank you very much [Applause]

Channel: Civil CAD Tutorials

Views: 7,563

Keywords: AutoCAD Tips and Tricks

Id: m5I7E008je8

Length: 62min 53sec (3773 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 17 2020