AutoCAD Productivity Tips and Tricks

are in listen-only mode hello everybody we want to welcome you to our latest webinar AutoCAD IQ session welcome whether it's good morning good afternoon a good night for you we're happy to have you with us today we are continuing in our productivity series today we're going to be looking at some tips and tricks to hopefully make you a bit more productive so Volker will be running the show today as typical Christina and I will be helping with answering questions and in ad-libbing where necessary we do have a few polls we're going to run right off the bat if that's okay so I'll run the first one we're just looking to see if this is your first webinar or if you've been with us before so if you could would love to see if you've been here before and it looks like a good amount 85% of you or so have been to previous sessions so welcome back and also welcome to those newcomers we hope that you know this will not be your only when you attend with us we're going to a second question which is just trying to get an idea of what type of software everybody is using and looks like a more than half Iran LT and about 30% on AutoCAD and then 15% on the vertical so the majority of what we go over is applicable to all of those so you should be able to find something that will help you today and then we're just going to ask one more quick one here which is if you're able to view the YouTube recordings of these sessions from your office so if you aren't aware all of these sessions are recorded we have a YouTube page where we post them all and hopefully they're useful for you to go back and look at or maybe share with others who weren't able to attend live and and that's fantastic 97% or able so that's great to see we know sometimes offices have some restrictions so that is great to see that for 97% of you that's not an issue so I will close that session and with that I will turn this over to Volker who will be helping us today go ahead Volker all right thanks Sean and thanks Kristina for being here and thank you everybody for attending especially those who have returned and those who are new but we're really happy to see you all here so as Sean said we are going to be working with some predicted productivity tips and tricks and prior to doing that though and some of you are probably getting bored with some of these beginning slides but just some general housekeeping here do leave questions in the chat window and Christina and Sean will be answering those as they come in and this session will be recorded we get a lot of the emails on this so I just want to point out yes they are recorded we try to post them as soon as we can and once yeah every once awhile it takes a little longer than other times but they are available on our YouTube channel this slide deck can also be downloaded there were some problems with the link I found that out last week that has been fixed and any of the powerpoints from previous sessions can now be downloaded all right we also have our landing page and again with the recordings as far as that goes this picture on the right side of the screen is a little out of date don't worry about that that's been updated on the on the website but here are is a quick link to our YouTube channel and if you were to click on this playlist a verb egde at the top left of that video you would be able to access the previous videos from there as well so just a quick way to get to those videos hey Volker yes Sean our to start interrupt we're getting a few questions that folk our only hearing audio they're not seeing the the PowerPoint I see it here on my end I don't know Christine or if you're seeing the PowerPoint or not well I think I think Volker is resetting it right now so yeah it is okay some of those are jumping in and saying they can see it now so if you're not seeing it maybe just just briefly just close the meeting and rejoin but it looks like it might just be sporadic so yeah sorry okay no glad you said that maybe the reset helped some people who weren't able to see it but as I was saying you can easily get to the previous web recordings right from this playlist also feel free to leave feedback there's a link to that on this page as to what you'd like to see in future webinars if you have some additional feedback and would like to email us go ahead and do so using the email address here at the bottom please send emails to that address not to us personally we normally don't have the time to answer those directly whereas we have a group of people who can answer the questions for you okay so just briefly some of the previous webinars that we've had last week we had macro automation and we've had some on grips plotting and so far these are all available on that webinar YouTube channel one more thing briefly is to check out our list knowledge network the I have top 10 viewed articles listed here but those are the top five to minimize the amount of verbage all these links and more of a are available on knowledge autodesk.com as well as within this PowerPoint and it's a great resource for learning for troubleshooting for downloads so I encourage you to visit that website all right let's get to agenda there's not much there okay just lots of tips on how you can make the most of AutoCAD software using both old-school and new-school functionality some of its autocad functionality of some of its windows functionality so autocad there's a lot of stuff we can do through windows and I'll show you a couple of tricks that will help you get to get the most out of using windows with in AutoCAD okay so we're going to go into the demo here and I do want to make one comment on this picture thanks to Christina for providing that one question in a previous webinar was what do you mean by back in the day okay it means something different for everybody for me it's about release ten okay of AutoCAD and that would be about 1990-91 for others it could mean 97 or 82 or whatever okay but you'll hear me refer to that a lot and just a brief explanation there I'm going to go ahead and switch to my AutoCAD that's actually Volker I don't feel like people know that's actually you and I in that picture yeah I wasn't going to admit that Sean oh all right so the first thing we're going to take a look at is you know the fact that we have many ways to be more productive in AutoCAD and some of those are whether we start up out of CAD quickly to launch a specific file we can easily do that in a couple of ways okay and one of those is just from the desktop now I already have AutoCAD open here okay and typically when you open model CAD you're going to get something go ahead and save that you're going to get something like this when you typically launch AutoCAD the first time but what if you want to start AutoCAD with your corporate template well one way to do this is to create a start-up switch and we actually talked about this in a previous webinar you and that is can everybody I'm hope everybody can still see my screen there it wasn't quite sure what happened there the the slide but not my desktop yeah we're seeing the the image of the back in the day but we're not seeing AutoCAD ah I wanted to show my desktop maybe I can't show that tip so we'll go with another one instead boy these glitches have these awkward moments all right I am launching AutoCAD LT I was going to show you a shortcut switch all actually update the PowerPoint slide with a quick description of how to do that creating a startup switch to launch with the specific template so instead what I'll do is show you another way to do this within AutoCAD I'm going to go into the options and I hope everybody can see AutoCAD and I select options by right mouse clicking over the command line and go to the files tab under the files tab we have template settings and here we have the location of our template files but we also have a function called cube new so if I want to launch AutoCAD with a specific template of my own line yes I'm sorry I know I'm interrupting a lot today we're still not seeing AutoCAD there's a lot of comments coming in as well that were folks are still just seeing the slide I'm not sure what's well that is what's happening all right let's try this do we see yeah okay I am yeah they have to apologize they did change the GoToMeeting software a couple of weeks ago and it seems to be acting a little different than it used to so anyway I'm going to continue sorry about that people no problem we're good now we're going to go into I went into options I did that by right mouse clicking options files support file search path and then here we have template settings there we go there it is now in template settings we have the location of our current template files and then we have a option called queue new so if I want a specific template I just double clicked on that path it launched this select file browser let's say I wanted a specific template to open up every time I start AutoCAD alright or every time I click on the queue new button up here that white sheet of paper then I could select that and it will launch this particular file every time I click Q new so I'm just going to demonstrate that so you know I'm not lying to you click on new and there's a new unnamed drawing although it's got content in it but that is a template drawing that first time I hit save it's going to prompt me for a name so that's one way to save time right there all right having done that let's take another look at options and in the options dialog we have a user preference tab and this is this is more about using your mouse right now we have an old-school way of working where whenever we use the right mouse button it would act as an enter command or as a repeat the last command okay now there is it brings up a right-click menu well using this option here under user preferences right click customization you can turn on what's called time sensitive right-click and this value right here of 250 milliseconds works perfectly for me but you may want to play around with it once I click apply and close apply okay now if I go in to say the line command which I just did if I right click and hold down just a fraction of a second it'll give me the right-click menu I'm going to pick a point here right-click menu but if I right-click quickly it cancels if I right-click quickly again note the command line it's now gone back and repeated that command so that's something to play with if if you haven't used it it may take you a little while you get used to but it it's really a very functional tool allow you to get work done quickly repeating commands or ending them take another look at a Windows function here oftentimes you'll have to go back to the same folder several times for a tope of drawing or save it there maybe you work between three or four different locations on your hard drive or network and you don't always want to use this Browse function okay so if I want to go to my site whoops fingers aren't working today let's say I need to go back to this folder here all the time which I do today what I'm going to do is make it active so there's my folder and then up here in the top left corner is add current folder to places you also have add to favorites but that's your kind of like your windows Internet Explorer type of favorites I'm going to add quote the current folder two places and it adds this folder here so if I cancel right now prompts me to save the changes to this places list and if I repeat that command I'm back in that folder right I don't want to be there I want to be here and I can easily access my files right mouse clicking over this you can remove it you can add another folder you can rename it through the properties here and you can add I think it's up to five additional folders under this I forget now I usually have just a couple on there some of these other ones can be deleted others can't but a great way to get to your drawings so having done that I'm going to go ahead and open up two of my drawings just by holding down the ctrl key I've selected two drawings which allows me to open up two files at one time or even more you could also use the shift key to select all of them and close that one we'll get rid of that one as well so that was the places bar okay um that one got a nice comment in the comments by the way Volker that seems like it was a big hit oh good good yeah it's yeah a lot of people don't look at them those little things like that and or you know until somebody points them out really so I'm glad that helped I'm going to go back into options quickly there are often times you're probably saving back to a previous release of AutoCAD maybe for a customer maybe aren't but I know a lot of folks are and they're using the save as command well if you are working on a project where you have a lot of work to be done that needs to be saved as a previous release make it a little easier on yourself and under in the options box dialog under open and save here you can choose from various flavors of AutoCAD releases okay going back to release 14 LT 97 LT 2000 LT 2007 so all those drawing formats are available once you make the selection and click apply you save it's going to save to that format just keep that in mind if you're going to be you know want to work with some of the newer functionality in AutoCAD for example if you go past 2008 annotation scaling is not going to be available to you so be aware that so that is saving to a previous drawing format it'll also save as a default to DXF file so all right here's one thing that I should have took that off of there earlier so would have been more of a surprise but on the Home tab here we have the layer drop-down control now layers there I think they're like the second use command in AutoCAD next to undo okay and the thing about it is we have this control we probably use quite often throughout the day but if you're on a different ribbon tab that is not available okay now without any customization of any kind here you can easily make this available on the quick access bar one way to do this is to right mouse click over that notice how it says add quick access toolbar you and so I've added it to the quick acts Toolbar and now it's going to be available regardless of what what tab I'm in okay so this will allow you to work with your layers more better so to speak you can also add additional commands from the drop down here one option I like having is the plot preview this is just a quick way to get to my plot preview having that icon there additional commands can also be chosen through the more commands that will take you into the cui editor and you can choose from just about any command you have so a nice little shortcut I like to have available up there now the crowd is professing their love for you Volker just just I'm glad the demos worthwhile okay so uh but I'm going to keep moving fast here okay just so we can squeeze in as much as we can all right so many of you are familiar with a OTS is typing in the letter L for the line command and so on maybe many of you are not familiar with that maybe you're just using the ribbon but not the command line the bottom line is we can easily type in what is called an alias for just about any command in AutoCAD and I'm going to show you how you can add your own aliases - and not the - AutoCAD or modify the ones that are available to you and the way we do this is under the manage tab we have under in the customization panel we have edit aliases there's also the autocorrect list and sentimentalist synonym list but I'm not going to get into that all right so edit aliases brings up a text editor and briefly in AutoCAD not AutoCAD LT AutoCAD yes I know we have an alias editor which works a little differently but it's an express tool and some users may not have expressed tools installed so this is the way you would also edit your aliases I'm not going to talk about the shell functions that we have in here but you'll see we have an alias for just about any AutoCAD command now back in the day when I started out there were like twelve aliases okay twelve commands that way delius's form we'd add our own that was to keep resources to a minimum as these are all loaded into memory nowadays like I said we have just about every command in AutoCAD it seems like it except one that we're going to add in a moment some of the aliases are actually long than the commands is what it seems like nowadays so I'm not sure why that is but you can modify this what I'm going to do is there is no alias for the queue select command for some reason not sure why and I use that all the time so I'm just going to quickly show you how to do this I'm going to go ahead and I like it and add if an alphabetical order so I'm going to keep it like that lips need to go down one more so I'm going to go ahead and put Q s e just use three letters on that it's just my preference you could do whatever you want and then I'm just going to go ahead and space over a few you could also use the tab bar but after that alias and the comma separation there the space is just a visual thing I'm going to put an asterisk which tells AutoCAD that hey this is the command I want to use here and then you would type in that command so Q select is the command I want quick select command and then I'm going to go ahead and save that PGP file now what much what happens here q s e pretty cool huh now the thing says yes that's okay we did we had a bit of a delay but it just now came up okay all right so sometimes that cue select may not work I actually had it in my PGP a little earlier and and it may not have cleared the memory or or whatever I'm not sure so here's something make a note of this after you create your alias and save the file you want to be aware of a command called re in it okay so if your PGP file does not update you need to invoke this command this reinitialize ation command select PGP file click OK and it works ok so re in it ar e I n I T and I T yeah okay so that is the PGP file everybody has a different one it seems like it so don't always expect the same functionality on another users computer alright I showed this one in my macro webinar last week but it is one of my favorites so I have to show it again without putting it on a tool palette i we all use our old snaps at least I'm hoping so we want to be precise with our drawings ok and if I am not sure what the settings are on line I could go into a dialog I could pull up a menu down here off of the status bar for the host snaps okay to me that's actually a lot more work than just quickly typing in Oz mode and changing the value to 15 which sets my Oh snaps to endpoint midpoint Center and node and I'm going to show you that right here endpoint midpoint Center and note those are my preferred favorites so how do we find out how we can use Oz mode to our advantage type it in a the command prompt f1 is so helpful not okay it really is it goes right to the command you're in for the topic and then you can just say okay I like endpoint I like midpoint Center and node what does this add up to so 1 plus 2 is 3 plus 4 is 7 plus 8 is 15 that's the value i typed in so very easy to set this in the PowerPoint I have a link to the Oz mode system variable actually Christina or Shawn if you could verify that if not I'll put it in there but make use of the help make use of this shortcut if you want to be precise you don't want to waste a lot of time going through dialogues it's a quick way to change that okay next up this command I've used it once in 23 odd years of drafting other than demonstrations of course and it's an old-school command it's called the change command it's not on the toolbar it's not on a ribbon it's not in a whatever you have to type it in and it was actually the predecessor to the properties palette and in in many ways so let's say we have this line work here which coincidentally we do and it's all pointed at these weird angles I want to straighten it out real quick well I could do something like grabbed end point grip and straighten it out turning on ortho or whatever but I'm lazy so I'm going to type in change okay that is the command we're working with change and it prompts me to select objects so I'm just going to go ahead and put a crossing window here and I'm done selecting objects and now the prompt is change point or properties so properties are you know color line type line weight etc I want to change the point but I want these horizontal so I'm going to do an ortho by pressing f8 I'm going to pick a point somewhere here and pick and the crowd goes wild right okay maybe just my imagination where would I use this here's a better example so I've got this wiring diagram somebody was stretching this and they kind of skewered it okay so I need to straighten it out so I can make it look a little more professional so again I'm going to go into the change command I'm going to right click to repeat my last command put a crossing window here right click to toilet I'm done selecting verify or though is on and I'm just going to go ahead and pick a point somewhere on the right pretty neat huh okay maybe it's just me but I do like I said I've only used it like once and a couple of decades worth of work but it's good to know about may come in handy someday can you do you want to take a couple questions real quick focus before you go on to the next yeah yeah sure why don't we do that we went to the next tool so first just a basic question what is the text editor that you are using somebody who is wondering oh it's yeah it's called text pad te XT P ad and I think they have a trial version or I don't know but it's really I've used it for decades and normally you'd pull up notepad here so I have to apologize in a way because I should be using the built in tools that Windows has but it is set as my default text editor so it it's what pops up just the way it's you know okay the way it's going to be my webinars so another question was can we apply aliases to the macros that we saw from the previous webinar you could but you don't want to the reason being let's say you send that macro to a colleague who has a different set of aliases then the chemical is not going to work you know so it's always best to use the full command in the macro you can then use shortcuts for the options so for example in here in the change command you know I would use to change but then I could use P for properties as the option I would discourage you from using an alias yes you can but I would discourage you from doing so okay great and the last one I'll leave up to your discretion if you can fit it into your schedule or not today somebody was asking if you could show the fastest way to use in to use the array command so again I'll leave that up to you if you have time today and if not maybe we can we can add that into a building into a future webinar when we can make sure to schedule at timelines but I'll leave that up to you okay yeah let's see what we can get done here but I'll make I'll put myself on the chopping block right now by saying that we are going to be covering some additional modify commands I think it's about like three webinars from now I'll make sure to put the array command in that one okay that that I promise all right all right okay so uh hey let's take a look at line types all right we have our AutoCAD line types right and if we want a custom one we could prime while we could learn how to write them all right and I know I don't have a problem doing that but some people you know hey maybe I just got to get this done it's only going to be used one time I don't need a customized line type I don't have the time to go through all that well you can easily create a line type just using any line object not a cab preferably a spline or P line and any block you may have in your drawing it's not going to be a true line type but all you need is a representation right so here we have a block it I'm just showing it for display purposes you don't have to be seeing it in order for this door I've called this F mark I think it is better double-check that because I'm going to be using it yes F mark and here I have two splines now we have commands that are called measure and divide and offhand I forget where they're located cated I think it's under the insert I'm not going a search for it right now in order to save time again measure and divide okay so I'm going to go ahead and type div takes me to the divide command and what this does it allows me to divide a line into the segment's into whatever number of segments I specify it doesn't physically break that line it just creates by default point objects however when I select the line work here whoops go selected all right it gives me the option to select a block now the block has to exist in the drawing in order for this to work you don't get the option to browse the hard drive or network okay but I'm going to go ahead and type B for block and I'm going to know the name F mark this is old school okay and then it says align the block with the object yes or no in this case I'll just say yes and then the number of segments for the line and I'll type six and there we go so it's created six segments and basically I have a line here with these markers here okay so this is a great way to quickly create a line line type to represent whatever telephone utility poles whatever maybe a fence post for a ranch let's take a look at measure work so almost the same but a little different I'm going to type M it met M II that's the shortcut for measure by default hit excuse me awkward alright I'm going to go ahead and select the line like I did previously be for block could have right clicked and selected block as well off of the context menu block name F mark yeah I want to align it but this time I have to tell it okay how long do you want these segments to be so maybe you want to fence pole every what 50 feet or something like that the lines not that long but I'm going to go ahead and type 10 and so every 10 units in this case it has placed one of those ah blocks you may find this useful maybe not but for some people I know I've had to use at times it's coming very handy alright switching gear by switching to a different drawing I'm actually going to go erase that guy right now I don't need them we have some tools that were introduced in just a few releases ago can't even remember how long ago now what if I need to select every single chair of this type in the drawing we actually covered this here in our selection webinar some of you may have forgotten some of you may not have seen that but we have this option here select similar if I select that it now tells me that whoops I went into the race command well it doesn't tell me anything really but it does show me in the drawing all the blocks that have been selected so now I can erase them move them change properties whatever there by default select similar basis the selection on a couple of property defaults the only way you can change those defaults is by typing in the command I'll just pick it off of the list so you can see what I'm talking about here and then you have the option for settings so by default it goes with layer and the name of the object okay but you can choose to say look I also i'm going to select stuff based on the line type or the color if it's by layer probably wouldn't work but if it has a color assigned to and you need to clean that up you can certainly change that here so select similar alright so in this case here let's take another look at this one step further if I select this I also have an option I love this add selected okay so in this case it could be a line it could be text whatever in this case it's a block and because I said hey I want to add another block like this I don't need to know its name I don't need to go into the insert command I just pick go through the motions to place the block and there it is okay so we've done that and let's do it again let's go ahead and add selected now this phone has a insertion based point lower right most of the time it that will work okay in this case it probably doesn't matter much but what if I want to be a little more specific what if let's say instead of lower right I want to have the top insertion point top left corner is the insertion point because of how I have to place it this is where we read the command line we need to be aware of what's going on an AutoCAD if you see my command line it I have six lines of text showing I want to see a little bit of the history and I also want to know what prompts are available one of those is base point so I'm going to go ahead and write up excuse me type B for base point and now look at that I haven't inserted this block yet it's just saying okay go ahead and pick that new base point I have it and I can now insert that block using that base booked so make use of the options within a command is what I'm trying to say here all right what if I have a block and I don't like the name of it I screwed up maybe I typed it wrong or a layer name needs to be changed we need to rename it these this way really it's through a command called rename there is no toolbar for this there's no ribbon you have to know this and the past there used to be a pulldown menu for it I believe what there was but I'm going to go ahead and type rename and it brings up a dialog and it allows me to select any of the objects in AutoCAD notice all the different styles and objects we have an AutoCAD that have names and in this case here this one's FN phone I'm just going to go ahead and type telephone foon rename - and now it's called telephone and click ok so if I list this block now there it is the new name ok speaking of renaming I've had this happen many times where I've needed to have a block in the drawing I've just created a bunch of blocks and then I need to create another one based on that same block okay maybe just a minor modification or maybe I just want to have two objects representing two different styles of phones so have this telephone here but I want another one called FN phone whatever that stands for okay the easiest way to create a copy this because we can't just insert it rename it we can't just rename it and have the same block have two names so what I'm going to do is I'm going to go ahead and right mouse click here and go into the block editor and this is to me is one of the coolest things about all the tools that are available in the block editor this simple bit of functionality and under open and save we have save block as so I'm going to go FN phone I'll click OK whoops I didn't want to W block that that was kind of dumb but I'll just go ahead and close that now and now I'll insert my FN phone whoops I must have cancelled out of that completely user error everybody do that again that's one of those awkward moments many of you have seen from me before look okay now close that and there it is feel I feel so much better now that it worked practice makes perfect it does it doesn't this is the first time I've ever used this tool okay so looking here we have FM phone and looking here we have telephone so I've had a need for it you may as well one day okay have you ever received a file and we are running short on time here but have you ever received a file where you're working for another company you aren't familiar with their standards but you need to complete a drawing using the standards within that drawing file okay you're unfamiliar with it and you really don't have time to learn it all what you can do what I do often is create a scratch pad as I call it it's probably not the technical verbage but I'm going to use ctrl f3 oops control 3 I'm not sure what I was thinking control 3 and I'm going to create myself a new palette okay and let's see where the new palette I'm going to call it scratch pad because I'm that daring all right having done that I am all I have to do here is drag the stuff I need to work with onto this palette and take a look at this so if I go into computer here going to properties tells me a computer tells me the name here it also tells me that the colors by layer and that it's on a layer called CPU and this one here would tell me that it is on a layer called chairs I also need to work with some interior you know cubicle walls okay so here we have a panel object a line object on a panel I'm going to go ahead and drag this up here as well now when you drag something like line work it actually gives you this little arrow here so that when you click on it you can select any type of line object available to you if I go into properties though I could easily change this to where I'm not using a flyout and in this case I'm just going to use the P line command will call this panels why not it's on the panel's layer okay and they are panels tells me what type of line type it is I'll click OK here all right so now obvious we you know we did a thing on blocks and and rx using x-rays and tool palettes okay so you can always revisit that webinar on the recordings but now I can easily insert these and if I go into the line command notice they're all on the same layer okay we should really turn out money there we go pullers all right so I can easily reuse the stuff out of this drawing all right so what happens I actually need to work in a new drawing here okay let's take a look up here we have some layers here and what I'm going to do now is I'm going to insert a chair that's pretty big for all that line work huh I'll go ahead and insert a computer notice the colors on these objects I'm going to go ahead and draw some light lips line work and if we take a look here you'll see not only has it brought in those objects but it's also brought in the layer that those objects reside on the properties of that layer so this is a quick way to work with somebody else's stuff if you don't have that set up as a standard of your own so would you mind just showing one more time how you got the tool palettes oh yeah sure I and actually I'm sorry we we did I did do that rather quickly I find myself getting into a rush here at the end one way is to use the the keyboard function control 3 ok control key and then the number 3 you can also go to the View tab and here we have somewhere on your tool palettes let's see layer properties calculator Oh property sheet set manager I never use this design Center Oh more palettes hope it's right here the big icon that almost hit me in the face actually it did hit me get a black eye now so that will also bring up your tool palette then I right clicked the right mouse click and I went new palette and I can give it a name I'll call this one Fred and you can just drag and drop stuff on there so hope that answered that question ok we're going to take a look at a couple more things here and then we will take some more Q&A before we have to end the session so the first one is I really am old school I really prefer to use the command line to get things done now there are times where I may be working in a large drawing even larger than this I've worked on projects which were yeah ski ski slopes or ski resorts you know just large civil projects and you often find yourself having to maybe work between one location in the drawing and then another location in the drawing now we have a command in AutoCAD called the view command and typically you would find a button for that on the ribbon appear now in this case and this is just something to be aware of anyway oftentimes you may not see all the tools that exist for the ribbon okay in this case the views option is not available now I've made it available by right clicking here and selecting to show that panel so I'm going to go ahead in this case first of all shut if you aren't familiar with the view command it saves a particular view in the drawing okay so that I can recall it or restore it at any time it will also save the layer properties that were with it and orientation and so forth I'm not going to get into this too specifically I'm going to show you just a quick way to get between places so I encourage you to go into view and then click on help to learn more about this but I'm going to what I'm going to do is create a new view right now and I'm going to call this one I like to keep things short and simple when using the command line I'm going to call it v1 now I'm going to define a window for it so this will be my view one right here and I am done so I accept that and I'll click okay now that was doing it through this dialogue so ya know that it exists what I'm going to do now is scoot on down to the lower portion of this drawing and I'm going to use the command line if you were with me last week in order to suppress a dialog you type off a minus sign or - and then either the command or in this case notice there's an alias - V okay and it gives me the same settings that we have in that dialog but I'm going to go ahead and tell do everything from the command line and I'm going to say let's go ahead and use a window so I type W oops and oh sorry and then it prompts me to save the name so I'm going to call this v2 and then prompts me for the window so I'm going to go ahead and put that window this is my second view and it's done creating it now regardless of where I am in the drawing I can type - V R oops - V enter our enter and then V one and it takes me there - the enter our enter v2 enter you can have this in a macro in the tool palette now just a quick way to get back and forth between locations and yes having it as placed on your tool palette as a macro I mean that's obviously the faster way but I've not found it that hard to just type that in real quickly either right now I wasn't but I am now on a layer employee and I want to make the layer 0 current quickly I could reach all the way up there but both my hands happen to be on the keyboard so I'm going to type C layer and it tells me the current layer I'm going to type 0 enter and it makes layer 0 current quick way to change layers obviously that pull down is very fast and effective but you could also use C C layer in the in a macro if you were to work with that if you were with me last week you ran into this one I'm going to show it for any new viewers but I want to create a construction layer I'm going to give it a color color yellow and I want to set it current we could do this in the layer dialog yes I don't want to go there I'm going to type - la enter I'm going to type M to make the layer Co NS t current after I make it I'm going to give it a color we're going to go ahead and cut all that color yellow because that's what the yellow is color yellow is called and we're going to apply to the construction layer and voila there it is the current layer construction oK we've got five minutes for some QA I'm not going to be able to get into that array function right now hopefully I can answer that and the webinar I'll try to be as complete as possible when we discuss it okay let me just try and ask a couple of the questions that I think are very quick and for anybody else if you had a question please go ahead and post that to the link that Christina posted our feedback link and we'll be happy to go there and answer it there but just quickly vocre a couple quick ones does the measure command work on a polar array yes I mean it as long as it's um well art well no I mean you're a polar array would be of numerous objects you would want to just array those objects the measure command is going to work on a continuous object so like like a circle okay it'll work on that but if you're just going to have an object that you want to array in a polar fashion then just array it around the center point I'm not sure how to answer that okay that's okay maybe maybe in a future webinar we can get a little more in depth than that and then just there were just one more there were a couple questions on if you could just explain again what putting in a - before the command will do yeah sure what the difference between that is sure so if I were to type in V for view or go up to the ribbon and select view it brings up the dialogue I want to suppress and access the functions of that dialogue from the command line so I would type in a - or - V or view - view and it gives me all the options on the command line that you know which is how we work with this stuff before we had dialogues and not OCAD we use the rename command earlier right so here's rename this dialogue if we take a look - rename our - rename all these same options are available here yeah so one of the real benefits to that is folks that use a lot of script or Lisp you obviously can't you know use commands that need a dialog box if you're writing script and Lisp but it is running through several commands but using the command line version of those same tools allows you to do that so it's really beneficial for for Lisp and script and those sorts of things so I'm going to run the last poll here well we have a couple minutes left great not in it's just where after you're done with that I'd like to just show the resources on the slide so sure yep go ahead Ron no problem so we're at about 70% and so far it's 100% yes so that is great to see where yeah awesome how did everybody picked up some new tools today yeah we are happy to hear that we'll try and keep that going hey here's some additional resources all right we have a minute or so left here these are on the PowerPoint slide that you can download from the link that will be in the follow up email from GoToMeeting we have a lot of blogs where you can get some of the some great tips and tricks from Lynn Al and Heidi Hewitt Sean Hurley these are all industry names they are all intelligent people Sean and I we actually work on the without a net blog there's developer blogs and the complete list of blogs is also available just at autodesk.com blogs I've put in a link to the AutoCAD startup switches and lt startups which is because some are not available in LT that are available in AutoCAD and a biggie here Autodesk screencast this is a great tip okay if you have to share information with someone else in your office or outside of your office on how to do something in AutoCAD or you want to send us a support brick quest and want to show us what's going on go to Autodesk screencast okay and grab their utility where you can record what's happening on your screen the cool thing about this utility is it not only does a record audio and video it also records the keyboard commands and mouse clicks that you use so that way we can follow or your other users in your company can follow exactly the steps you're using you can then upload to the site and make those videos available to everybody if you want to just teach the world or you can make them private to only those who have the link okay this is a free utility it's great all you need to do is sign in using your Autodesk account got that out very good I think that's about it for time right Sean we are we are right at the time so thank you so much focus I'm glad to see everybody everybody really enjoyed the session today and learn some new things we hope to see you all next week for our next session so thank you again everyone have a great rest of your week thank you you

Channel: AutoCAD

Views: 79,768

Keywords: Architecture software, Product design, Factory design, Design suite, CAD design, CAD software, Drafting software, Autocad (Software), Tips, Tricks

Id: nNTSezq8PzY

Length: 60min 54sec (3654 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 30 2015