The Dos and Don’ts of AutoCAD—Do Attend!

ADAM DIRIG: Welcome. This is the Dos and Don'ts of AutoCAD. My name is Adam Dirig. 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 streamline things. The biggest thing for me is efficiency. I love efficiency. The more quickly I can do something, the better. More money I make, really, but sometimes doing tedious things over and over again gets old, so some of these tips and tricks are to showcase how you get around that.

I'm going to 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 a step-by-step of what we're doing in the class, the class handout's going to be the best way to do that. I have everything written out there a little bit more detailed, and I'm probably-- for time's sake, I'm going to be going through some of these items a little quicker and try and focus on the ones that really made an impact with me.

So if you have any questions too, you can keep those to the end, and then 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. Again, this is kind of the way the presentation looks. It's got our bullet points. And for time's sake, I'm going to 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 this, it's fine-- for the first couple hundred times that you open up AutoCAD, but after a while, 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 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 basically the location of the acad.exe file, and then the product, and the language that it's in. And what you can do is you can actually edit what happens when you open it. And I've just got two things in here that I've put in, but 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 quotation mark, I put a forward slash-- no logo. Forward slash 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 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 faster-- 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 going to be using AutoCAD 2018 today. We have a subscription, so we get the latest and greatest. And I'm going to be using the full version. So this-- a lot of these tips work for Lite, but the full version is really the one that I use. All right. 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-- all this text that I just entered in there has now gone back to these attribute definitions? AutoCAD has come out with-- they have Express Tools, and we're going to 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-- with a little tweak here-- was this, which I can just stretch and make bigger.

And what Burst does is it explodes the block, but it keeps all of your text that you've entered-- so it's a really handy thing when you want to keep that and not lose it. I mean 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 worked with other people's files-- like say, you go to a manufacturer's website and you download a whole bunch of files for like, sinks or 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 textiles, 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 P-U. This dialog box comes up, and you have some options. You can Purge blocks.

There's a whole bunch of blocks-- and 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, I'm going to 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 can't purge. So basically, to run the Purge, you can do 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 makes your file size a little bit smaller, 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-- AutoCAD is a very logical program.

It's all mathematical based. I'm very mathematical 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 Audit command to check to see. So if I run Audit command, and I can open up my command prompt so you can see it a little bit better-- you see Audit's right in there. I'm going to hit Enter, and it's going to ask me, do you want to fix any of the errors? I'm going to 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-- found six errors and fixed six errors. So not necessarily too crazy-- I've run some files that have been really crazy that had 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 are 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.

Between Audit and Purge, you can clean up a drawing or 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 is another feature-- it's like bringing in the big guns. It's use Recover. Recover is a way to check a file. 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 are working in, and it says-- there are errors in these files that cannot open. Chances are AutoCAD is going to say, why don't you use the Recover command?

So there's a way-- that's 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 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 going to come up-- came up with a six. I don't think I saved the last one.

So it's very similar to Audit, but it can go through a little bit more thoroughly, and correct any issues. So now if your drawing doesn't open with the Recover command, that's another story. The last thing in this topic is do Subscribe. Now, Autodesk did not make me put this in here. 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 an issue with something, you can email them, and they'll get back to you. And you can install AutoCAD on two machines-- one office machine and one mobile machine, or home machine. I have stuff in my handout that gives you some more benefits to subscriptions, and some knowledge, and also where you can get the latest and greatest.

I'm going to come back to the subject a couple of times as I'm showing you some other features. Because we're on subscription, we get the latest version every year, and there has been some milestone years where you just get a plethora of more features that are great time-saving ones. 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. And I got a lot of stuff in this one.

And now let's get right into it. Oh, did I miss one? I 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 one that's really helped me. All right. Now to the next category. Do right click on your DWG tab. So in 2015 I think, or 2016, AutoCAD introduced these drawing tabs. What you can see-- I'm tabbing back and forth. And this is a way that, if you have 10 drawings open, you can see them all right there. Instead of doing control tab, or going up here to the window drop down to switch into different 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-- 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 wanted to alt tab in a certain sequence, but you couldn't do it-- or control tab in a certain sequence. Well now, you can organize these drawings, you can 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 location of where the DWG is located. This has saved me many times of having to go and try and figure out-- 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 annotative 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 AutoCAD in 2008, they came out with annotative scaling. Now way back when, when we had to scale drawings, there was a whole ratio and a fit chart that you would have to do.

And basically-- the reason for it is so that when you have all of your views on the page, you can have different scaled views-- and all the text is the same height. That's just a drafting standard. So before to do that, we would have 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 dimensioned, 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 annotative scaling. And basically this eliminates the clutter of your template file, and it makes it so that you can basically just change a 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 dimensioned-- it's a different size. But these are still the same dimension style. So if I wanted to switch to a different one, it wouldn't screw everything up. And 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 Dos and Don'ts that have really benefited 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 figured out this year, and it sounds really simple-- 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 I have 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-- for my business, we use laser scanning technology. And so I went and I scanned a room that we were putting millwork in. And then I had to go through and make it so that the drawing was actually editable-- or not editable, but 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, it's 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've found that I-- oh shoot, I forgot one little thing. I mean, there's a lot of stuff going on here. 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 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 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 a database.

So when you change information in the database, it'll update your drawing file. Mostly text, but 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 too. Oh, I guess I did spell that right. I'm not a very good speller, and AutoCAD is great for correcting that. All right-- so I want to 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 in to 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 field data that's populated by the Sheet Set. So if I wanted to drop in another view-- let's see here. I can go into Model tab, and-- there we go. Drag and drop a view. And this is coming from a different location. It's the Sheet Set in the background is x referencing stuff, and making it work. But it's from a different location-- 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 a really awesome thing. But they're only great if only about one to three people are working on the project. We've 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 three people working on it. And I have a link in the handout to that class as well, if you're curious to learn a little bit more. Do use Fields-- this goes together with Sheet Sets. How many people have ever used a field in here? So about half of you. Fields are a pretty cool feature of AutoCAD. I don't know if you've ever used Excel or Word, there's ways to do fields in those.

But AutoCAD has that functionality as well, and this is a drawing that I have some fields in. You can see on the-- jeez. My uh--

AUDIENCE: Title block.

ADAM DIRIG: There we go-- the title block, thank you. You can see on the title block there are some gray areas that are there. So if I type in DWG props-- you can see I have a whole bunch of different things here. So if I want to change this to maybe today-- 11/14/2017-- I can click OK, and on all six pages that I have here, the date when I hit R-E or region, will change automatically. Fields are easily accessed by-- if you have a text thing-- doing control 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 dropdown-- so there's things that you can get like date and time, document size, objects. There is one that we have that we found out, which is really very cool. See how or the drawing number is 13.1. We have this directly linked to the tab. So if I right click and rename this time 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, just because of time.

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 the ability to have AutoCAD open on one screen, and another program open on the other screen. I have a 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've used this more recently than I ever have before, and it's really beneficial. It really helps boost your speed and productivity. How many people in here have ever used Action Recorder? OK, so about 30%. Basically, Action Recorder is very similar to a LISP routine. And LISP routines, you do a command and it runs a series of commands. The easier ones are very easy to-- after you 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 play them back. A couple of different-- So it's found in the Manage tab, and under Record-- there's a Record, and it says Action Recorder there-- 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 hatch this rectangle, and then I hit Stop.

It's going to ask me to save a name. So I'm going to say AU 2017. Click OK, and now this is saved. And now I'm going to actually move this because I'm going to 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 it's 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 going to hit Play again. And it's going to give me just the crosshair like I was going to be placing it someplace. And now when I place it, it's going to 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 when I turn it off because 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 actually zooming to a certain spot, which I can fix that later. But now you can see the benefit of this, and this is just a very simple example. To show you a little bit more in-depth example, this is-- and again, this is kind of like use your imagination. I'm sure not too many people are messing with scans like this everyday. But this is one area that I used it.

This is a Scan file that comes from that 3D scanner that I use. And you can see it comes in all a little crazy. The numbers are big, there's points everywhere-- but it comes in, it's exported 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 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 pause for the user input. And what that just did was that opened up the Block Editor. It changed the way 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-- this is an abstract one, but you can really do--

This was another file that I use this on, and it helped me with it 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 was I had to 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 we make-- it's just like a command. So if I type in AU 2017, now it's going to run that action all over again. So, very cool. I would definitely suggest, if you haven't used that, to try it out. It's been a benefit for me. Do use Dynamic Blocks. I just talked about Dynamic Blocks-- I'll get into them a little bit more. Dynamic Blocks are something that I have-- again, in 2008, they came out with these.

Kind of revolutionized the reusable content approach. And what they are-- they're blocks that you can manipulate and change, but 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-- it's totally stretch-able for 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, they're something very powerful. So this is just a snippet inside the Block Editor of what's going on inside, and definitely a Do for AutoCAD. But the thing about Dynamic Blocks is you don't want to get too crazy about them. When they first came out, I was going nuts. I was having stretches here, stretches there. I would do 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 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 utilized those smaller Dynamic Blocks to create the whole drawing. So-- very, very important to not get too crazy. And then again, back to the border of the objects that are 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 workflow with Dynamic Blocks, 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 border to the front and rehatch it, and your blocks will work much better. Do Redefine blocks. Still in the block area, but this is one that I have-- that I found one day.

I was in my tool palettes, and I was messing around 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-- I've already added the block that's here. I just drag and drop it to the tool palette, 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 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 block is coming from. The way I set up drawings in general, or a job, is we have a file that's just all blocks. And then we have all the files for the rooms that we're working on are-- they utilize the blocks from that one file. So we set up a block file, we set up a tool palette that is directly connected to that block file. So if there is a major change on a whole job, and I have 10 people working on it, we'll update the block file, and then we'll just go through and you can 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 jump in here, and I edit this block to not have these. I'm just going to turn off or delete these lines. Delete one, delete two, save and close. Everything's adjusted here. Now if I go back into my two file, you can see it's still there. So if we right click on this, hit Redefine, it will update that and make it look crazy. I think there is a view--

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

ADAM DIRIG: Yeah, I was going to say-- I think I have to save this. So I save this file. Oh yeah, save 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-- the hatches always go a little crazy like this, and if I just do Regenerate, 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, that's not something I use everyday, but it's actually pretty cool.

So if you're using the Extend command-- say I want to extend this line to this or to this one-- I can hit E-X 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 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. The Shift will 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 are Express Tools. And they're found in a couple of different locations-- there is a ribbon that is all Express Tools, and then there's a dropdown 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 the way that you work in this Express Tool thing, and I'm going to show you just a few that I found really save me a ton of time.

But these are-- I was trying to think of the name. These are like not really supported by Autodesk. Their programmers just kind of made these as, these are really cool, but sometimes they might not work-- features. But they're really pretty powerful. And sometimes this is where like commands start, and then they migrate to the main set of commands that AutoCAD can do. And how am I doing on time? So Express Tools-- I'm going to just open up my-- There's a few that I use. BREAKLINE is one.

If you ever had to create a breakline, Express Tools will do it for you automatically. Now it's yelling at me. I use the command line to do this so much-- so we can draw a breakline symbol, and basically you can set a scale, and you can set an extension, and draw two points, and it'll automatically create your breakline It just creates a 2D polyline, but it's very easy, and you can customize what's going on there. One that I use more than anything else is Viewport Sync. This one will sync Viewports to each other.

So I have a file that I want to lay out, and what I've done is I created a very large viewport into my model space. And you can see all the-- 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 going to just go into my model space, and make sure that I'm set to inch and a half scale, which I am. Whoops-- and I'm going to go back to test. And with the Viewport Sync I can draw Viewports around these. So I have a quick command for drawing a Viewport.

And you can see the one that I just drew, you can see the model space, a smaller window of it. So now I'm just going through and dropping these Viewports over top of the ones. And I have the rectangles in there so everything aligns. So now that I've done that, I can type in VPSync, and it's going to 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 sync together.

So when I select all those and right click, you'll see all of them 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 must have missed. So these Viewports are already done, they're ready to go. And now what-- oh, and a text came in. If your model space is set to a different scale, then you just have to update the scale. But that's a quick and easy fix. So this is a way-- this is the way that I lay out all my pages now.

It's super quick, it's very efficient, and it's all on Express Tool. Another one that's really powerful is-- if you do 3D stuff, you can use-- it's called the Flatten command, and it'll take everything that's in Z, and flatten it down. All right. I want to get-- going to go it just a little bit faster so it can get all this done here. So Do use the Isolate command. Isolate is another one they 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 see one thing, the Isolate command is really good to do that.

You can right click and hit Isolate, and it will select just those items. Or you can hide those items if you want. Do use Quick Select. How many people have used Quick Select in here? So about half of you. Quick Select is one of those commands that really selects things quickly. I guess that's-- it's one of those things that, once you start using it, you'll use it quite a lot. And the command for it is-- you can type in Quick Select, or you can do Q-S, 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 is a lot of things that I probably don't even utilize the way I could. But you can Quick Select stuff like blocks or dimensions, or certain geometry-- that's 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 automatically select.

This is great if you want to clean up a file. Do use Select Similar. This is another one that is beneficial for-- 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 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 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 on one side and see what's going on the other side. So 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-- which line is which? And when I select it here, you can see it selecting in the 3D. But again, this works-- say you're working on a large file and 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 that 2D work in this as well. Very, very useful when you need it. Next category-- I'm going to try and button this up here. This one is settings. That will be catered more to your needs.

Do set up 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 Options, or O-P for Options, the Options dialog box will come up. And under Open and save, you will see it's got an Autosave setting. This by default, I think, is set up-- I think it's set up for 10 minutes apart. But 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-- so 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% of you. OK. 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.