What's New in AutoCAD 2023! Digging into the Details!

VOLKER COCCO: Hello, everyone. My name is Volker. Thank you for joining this Autodesk University 2022 session on what's new in AutoCAD 2023, digging into the details. Again, my name is Volker, and I'll be your presenter for today and tomorrow as well, if I were to do this.

A little bit about myself. I am a AutoCAD technical enablement specialist at Autodesk Global Product Support. I've been in the industry since 1991 and have worked for Autodesk for the last 11 years and have also been a CAD drafter, as well as a CAD manager. I've worked for resellers, where I have done training, consulting, customization for customers, and just basic technical support for our customers.

And in addition to that, I have done training at technical schools. I've AUGI CAD camp, as well as Autodesk University. And I won't bore you with more of that right now. Let's just, as much as I want to move along with the presentation, I do need to show you the Safe Harbor Statement. You'll be seeing this a lot from any of the Autodesk employees whose sessions you may attend or watch later.

But basically, anything I tell you here, if there are changes because of software updates or new technology that comes out, what you're seeing is as it is at this time. And don't base any future purchases based on what I've said in this particular presentation, because updates could change the software. And be sure to check out trial versions before making your purchases.

Anyway, I hope you've had a chance to skim through this document. I am going to move on, because we are pressed-- not pressed for time, but we have a lot to show you. And I want to be able to show you as much as I can.

So looking at our agenda here, we're going to take a look at the-- well, I'm going to introduce you to all the new and improved features in AutoCAD 2023. So there's a lot of stuff here. But due to time constraints, again, I can only demonstrate some of the features.

So I'm going to encourage you to download the handout as well as the data set, which I'm making available. This expands on all the topics. And it does include links to additional documentation about these topics, as well as I've added tutorials for every one of the features that I am presenting in this session.

So download that as well as the data set. And you'll be ready to roll. So we're going to take a look at some enhancements and new features added to the insights, curated insights in AutoCAD. These insights were introduced in, I believe it was AutoCAD 2019.

They basically take a look at what the application is doing, what commands are being used. And they provide you, the end user, with articles or tutorials that may help improve your productivity. With AutoCAD 2023, this has gone a step further with command macros, which we'll talk about shortly.

We're also going to take a look at another great new feature and enhancement, an enhancement to the trace command introduced last release, and then Markup Import and Markup Assist, which will save you so much time when you receive markups from out in the field. So again, we'll expand on that shortly. And finally, we're going to end up with commands and system variables that are going to help you be more productive.

These are actually some of my favorite features, speaking as someone who's done CAD drafting, that were introduced or enhanced in AutoCAD 2023. It's all about productivity. And that's why I'm looking forward to showing you those enhancements and new commands.

All righty, so let's start off, first of all, with a little bit about AutoCAD 2023. So it was released March 29th of this year, 2022. And for the first time, this included releasing the specialized toolset, such as AutoCAD Architecture, Mechanical, MEP, et cetera, and AutoCAD for Mac all on the same day.

And shortly-- well, shortly after, six months later approximately, four months later actually, AutoCAD 2023.1 was released. This is a planned semi-annual update to the latest release of AutoCAD. And it not only improves the application for any issues which may have been reported or updates introduced by the operating system, but it also introduces enhancements as well as new features to the existing application.

AutoCAD 2023 is available to install on 64-bit Windows 11 or Windows 10. And Windows 10, it's version 1809 or above. I would encourage you to take a look at the AutoCAD 2023 system requirements. The link for that is also in the handout.

But just confirm everything's good. Now, if you're running AutoCAD 2022 or 2021, you should be fine upgrading your system requirements. It should be just great for running this latest release.

One of the, I'd say the most frequently asked question we receive when a new release of AutoCAD comes out is, hey, has the drawing format changed? No, it has not. It remains AutoCAD 2018.

So you have drawing compatibility between AutoCAD 2018 and 2023. And of course, you can still open up earlier drawings created by earlier releases. And of course, you can always use the Save As function to save to a previous release if you need to.

I've got a couple items here that are for those who are a little more on the administrative side maybe, or development side. The registry key has changed from our 24.1 to our 24.2. And basically, if you were to look in your app data folder, you would see the full install path for your support files being shown as our 24.2.

Now, it does maintain binary compatibility with AutoCAD 2021 and 2022. And so this means any custom applications, ARX based applications that tie into the C environment and development environment, you should not have any problems running those. They should work just fine on AutoCAD 2023. Unless the developer of that custom app did something special. Again, there shouldn't be any problem.

And 2023 was developed on Visual Studio 2019 version 16.11.5 IDE. And that's about as geeky as we will get. All right, let's take a look at some of the features introduced.

Again, I'm just going to talk about a lot of these. I don't want to PowerPoint you to death. We'll get into demos shortly.

All right, so first of all, on subtle feature available is with the options dialog. It's been enhanced so that if you make changes to options in AutoCAD, you're going to be prompted to save those changes or discard them if you forget to apply the changes or if you cancel out of the dialog. So that should save you from losing some of those changes if you've had that happen.

If you use the DWG to pc3 three print driver, AutoCAD now uses the Adobe API instead of the PDF Tron API from previous releases, that previous releases use. So you shouldn't see any difference. This is more, it's been a request, and it allows greater compatibility with Adobe.

A nice, subtle change is when you select New Drawing from the start page. It now shows you which template you used last in a tooltip so that, let's say you worked on an Imperial drawing, but you need to use a metric. Just hover over that tooltip to see which one you've used last. It's not a big change, but a subtle enhancement that should help.

Customer reporting is a lot easier. Once you've signed into your account, the CER dialog will now populate your email address so that if AutoCAD crashes and you need to submit an error report, that information is there. And it's just a click of a button for you to submit the information we need to diagnose where the crash occurred.

All righty, so let's take a look, one of the new enhancements here. Again, I'm going to talk about this. But the handout does have a tutorial as well as expanded information. The count command was introduced in AutoCAD 2022.

And they're-- great tool. Lets you count your blocks and your drawing. With 2023, you can now create a selection set of your-- using either a rectangular or polygonal selection area. You can choose the entire Model Space, or you can select a boundary object as a count area, as long as it's a valid boundary object. So in other words, it must be a closed polyline that does not intersect with itself.

You can also add on to a previous account selection. So you've selected something, and you need to then do another count by adding additional content in the drawing. You can do this with the enhanced count feature. So hopefully that'll make things a little nicer for you.

So Sheet Set Manager for Web. As you know, we're big on AutoCAD mobile in AutoCAD web, allowing you to work in the field with AutoCAD drawings. Now with AutoCAD 2023, you can create sheet sets which can be viewed in AutoCAD web and mobile.

AutoCAD introduced this light version of the legacy Sheet Set Manager. And it just means the dialog is a little different. Not all the functionality of the desktop Sheet Set Manager is available in the web. But you can display and manage named collections of drawing sheets stored in Autodesk Docs. And opening up a DST file from Autodesk Docs will display the Sheet Set Manager for web by default.

Now, you can create. Some of the capabilities are there. Again, it's limited, but the initial release of the Sheet Set Manager allows you to create remove sheet sets and subsets on the web, define sheets that properties, including sheets and subsets, publish sheet sets to PDF, and e-transmit them as well.

Now, with AutoCAD 2023.1, that update, it's been enhanced even more. And we now have the ability to create a sheet set through AutoCAD Web. And you can add, create using any one of your templates, as long as they're using Autodesk Docs to create that sheet set.

Some of the key changes in addition to that are the ability to import a layout to a cloud sheet set. So any existing layout you have, you can now rename and renumber sheet sets. It now has an automatic numbering option for new sheet sets.

You can manage any of your support files for your sheet set and add custom properties. You would need to have Desktop Connector installed for Autodesk Docs. And doing so, you can then navigate and manage that sheet set as if it were local.

All righty. Now, again, there is a lot more to this. The handout does have tutorials. And it does-- I've included the data set that you can work with as well.

All righty, Performance Analyzer. We've had a Performance Monitor that can be used in AutoCAD for quite a while now. And with that particular Performance Monitor, you would upload a file to Autodesk, where our team analyzes it.

And it's pretty intensive analyzation of what the performance issue is. However, we're now introducing a performance analyzer that allows you to see where the problem lies when you have a AutoCAD drawing that seemed slow, unresponsive, or even when starting up, is slower than expected. So this, you can diagnose operations, such as opening AutoCAD applications or drawings, moving the mouse, a slow cursor or jerky cursor movement, performance issues when switching layouts, printing or plotting, starting command, or when selecting objects.

There are two new commands here, PERFANALYZER and PERFANALYZERCLOSE. Those are the two. You can also find this on the Manage tab of the ribbon, Performance Analyzer.

One thing about, that I do want to point out about this, it's not going to solve what the issue is at this stage. But it does point you to where that problem lies. So let's say you have a drawing with a bunch of Xrefs, and it's taking a long time to open up.

The performance analyzer will let you know which particular drawing is having the performance issue, which Xref is having the performance issue. And maybe it's not found, or it's in a server that no longer exists and so forth. So I encourage you to check it out and provide feedback on this particular tool.

Another enhancement introduced in AutoCAD 2023.1 is a new AI-guided assistant. And it is available in AutoCAD Help. This assistant offers AI-guided self-service and options to contact support from within AutoCAD.

It'll help you find solutions to any questions you have. If necessary, if you can't find the proper solution, you can easily select the chat button and engage in a two-way chat with one of our product support agents, or even create a support case if necessary. Now, at this point, this Autodesk supported assistant is in beta. And it's only available for English language AutoCAD for that to be available for you.

It's not available in AutoCAD or any of the verticals at this time. We are getting there. And this should improve helping you with AutoCAD questions or issues.

AutoCAD 2023 also improved graphics for both 2D and 3D on the 2D graphic enhancements. It's a completely new graphics engine. It provides a better display effect on most of the high end GPUs that support DirectX 12. This new graphic engine will improve Zoom and Pan Performance for drawings with an enormous amount of two type fonts, long polylines or solid hatches in a 2D wireframe visual style. The GPU memory itself, that usage has been optimized when opening multiple drawings in a direct X12 mode. We have removed support for DirectX 9, so do be aware of that.

For 3D, performance has also just been improved dramatically. This cross-platform 3D graphics system we're using leverages all the power of modern GPUs and multi-core CPUs, which offers smooth navigation experience in your large AutoCAD drawings. That said, it does require that shaded and shaded with edges visual style be used in those drawings.

However, I think you'll find the quality is pretty darn good, yeah. It is, however, limited to our Model Space environment. Any of the Paper Space view ports are going to use the existing graphics systems. But you're doing your work in the Model Space environment, so that should not be that big of an issue for anybody.

Currently, it does not support point clouds, materials, so geolocation, your mapping system, large coordinates, or customization of your visual styles. Again, this is constantly being improved. So you're going to see more changes, more improvements, as time goes by.

And just to let you know, there is a system variable here called FASTSHADEMODE, which is on by default. If you are having graphic display issues, you can always turn FASTSHADEMODE off. For those of you running 2022 AutoCAD, previously this was a technical preview. And there was a command called-- or system variable called 3D tech preview. This is no longer available. FASTSHADEMODE has taken that place.

OK, so now let's take a look here, AutoCAD 2023 Floating Windows. These were introduced in AutoCAD 2022 and much requested. And we've enhanced this with AutoCAD 2023.

So the floating windows initially allowed multiple drawing files to be visible at the same time without switching tabs. So basically, you can pick on a drawing tab, drag it to a new monitor if you want to, or several drawings to a new monitor. The improvements that are made in AutoCAD 2023 now include the ability to anchor the command line and have it stay with the active window. Actually, it does this by default.

Any floating command window will maintain its position in the drawing. If drawing windows overlap, the active drawing window displays on top. And you can pin a drawing window to a location on your monitor.

And this pin drawing window remains on top of the main AutoCAD application window. Right clicking over the title bar will provide additional options, like Move To Tab, Pin, Saving The Drawing, Save As the drawing, et cetera, so improvements made to this as well.

All right, we're getting close to doing a demo here. We're going to talk about my insights, the MacroAdvisor. And what we'll take a look at here is the command macro functionality that was added to improve productivity.

Macros have always been something I've been fond of. It allows me or you to combine multiple commands in AutoCAD into one command. And they're fairly easy to create from the command line. But they can also be daunting, depending on the user.

And nothing wrong with that. It is the reason, why the MacroAdvisor is here, is to show you how command macros can be used, but also to provide you with insights based on your usage as to how a command macro will help you be more productive. Again, these macros that are presented to you through insights are based on your command usage. And there is a way for you to try out and test these macros when they're made available, as there is a new palette with a saved and insights tab.

And there's functionality there that will allow you, not only to execute the macro to see how it works, but to save it to your own menu system. And if you want to edit that macro and make it more yours, maybe specific layers or repetitions that you would like to see. So these, this Macro Advisor or command macros, they do introduce a couple of new commands here.

COMMANDMACROS, which opens up that macro palette, I referred to, and COMMANDMACROCLOSE, which closes the palette. We also have some system variables, which allow you to set the defaults for some of these, the notification for when macros are available. These command macros, every user is going to see, I believe it's two when they first install AutoCAD, a couple of sample macros.

And as you use AutoCAD, and it does take a little bit of repetition, it doesn't happen immediately after you repeat a function, a series of functions automatically-- it's not going to create a macro for you right away. It does take a little bit of time. So don't expect a new macro every time you use AutoCAD.

But as Insights finds out what your command usage is, you will be presented with more macros. So having said that, let's take a look at command macros in AutoCAD. I'm going to go ahead and switch to AutoCAD here. And I'll open up one of my drawings.

And going to the View tab, I have a button up here now for command macros, which opens up the command macro palette. Now, when you do this, and I have a tutorial for you in the handout, your palette may differ from mine, depending on your usage or if you've only had the two default macros. But basically, the Insights tab of this palette shows you what Insights has determined your usage to be and will provide you with sample macros.

Now, take a look here on this Ellipse button. There's the option to try this, to save it, or dismiss it. Now, very important, if you dismiss the macro, you're not going to get it back. So think twice before getting rid of it.

I would encourage you to save it, if anything. You may not need it now. But at a later date, you may find you have a need for it.

So we can try this. So let's take a look here. Copy and change existing text. I'm going to go ahead and try this. And I'm going to select this text here.

And it prompts me to specify a base point and then a second base point. And as soon as I do that, it goes right into the text setup mode. I'm going to go ahead and just type something, New Text. And I've created, used this macro.

Now, having said that, it automatically opened up the Edit mode or the Details mode here, which I can also open or close like this. And it shows me what it did to create that macro and the description for that. Now, there are a couple of others here. I'm not going to go through these. But I think you'll find these macros useful.

And I'm going to go ahead and click Save. I can also say, hey, I like this. Yes, it was helpful. Might as well do that, thanks. I'll click Save.

And what it does, it creates that macro on this particular palette. So copy and change text. I add another one copy, rotate previous. And selecting this macro will allow me to just see details about it or tooltip about it.

But if I right mouse click on it, I have some options. One of those is to Add to Ribbon, to Edit that macro, Edit in the CUI, if I really want to do a lot of customization. It'll open up the AutoCAD customizations editor.

And I can rename this macro. Maybe I want to call it Fred, I don't know, just saying. I can also delete it, which I don't want to do. Or I can run it from here.

What I would say is, once you have one of these macros available, if it's working for you, definitely save it and add it to the ribbon. And what happens is, it's going to take that macro, it's going to move it off of this palette. Mine works a little different, because I had to set up AutoCAD. But it would move it from this palette and add it to a automation ribbon tab.

Once it's off of the palette, you're not going to be able to get it back on there. And also, you can't add your own macros to this palette. So just be aware of that.

This is like a, either leave it here or move it. I encourage you to move it to the ribbon. In fact, in the handout, I encourage you to create a partial CUI and add it to that to make it a little more portable. And I've got information on how you can do that in that handout.

So this is pretty cool stuff, these command macros. But not only will they make you more productive, but they will also help you learn how to create your own macros. Let us move on. And now, you probably have questions. You're always welcome to follow up with me.

All right, we're going to talk a little bit about some of the collaboration functionality that has been enhanced or added to AutoCAD, the first one being AutoCAD Trace, which was introduced in AutoCAD 2022. With the introduction, the traces could be created. And traces are just markups that can be done.

If you aren't familiar with this, they're markups that can be made to the drawing by someone out in the field. Previously, this could only be done in AutoCAD Web, Mobile. With AutoCAD 2023, this has been enhanced to where you can now trade traces in the desktop AutoCAD.

You can also add to traces created by others. This was not doable in the past, so depends on your need. And we have added a couple of new commands to this, Trace Edit, which changes the active trace to an Edit mode, so that you can add to it. And Trace View, which allows-- changes the view mode so that you can edit the current drawing while still seeing the trace. This was not doable previously.

So let's take a look at how that works. Switch back to AutoCAD. And let's go to the floor plan sample I have here. I'm going to go ahead and close this palette. We don't need it.

First thing, you'll see that there was a trace added or modified in this tooltip here. And I'm going to go ahead and just click on the hyperlink. And it shows me that, yeah, there's a markup there that somebody made in the field.

And if I go to the Traces bar here, you'll see there's a avatar. And it shows me who last modified this drawing with a trace. And here, we can see that we can toggle between Edit, and View Trace.

We're in Edit mode right now. So I can actually add my own markup to this particular drawing. We can also just close the trace tool here. Let me go ahead and run a macro to create a layer.

And I'm going to go ahead and just create a-- zoom in on this area here a little bit. I'll create a rectangle. I'm just typing this in to speed things up a little bit.

You should all be familiar with the rectangle command. I'm going to go into the REVCLOUD command now. And I'm going to select the object. And I've created a revision cloud.

So let's go ahead and also add an Mleader, I guess. Pick a point there. Oops, did that wrong. Let's go ahead.

And so basically, I just use the same text as this was there. But I also want this door changed. All right, so like I said, we're in Edit mode right now.

If I go ahead and close this. Those markups disappear, as they should. Going to the Collaborate tab, I'm going to open up that traces palette. We'll get back to those markups in a moment.

I have mine in auto hide. And you'll see that we now have-- this was the same icon we had on the traces toolbar at the top of the screen earlier. But it now, not only has that blank avatar, but it also has my own, which is what I use in my Autodesk account.

And here, it also shows me when the original trace was created, March 2022, and that it was last modified by me. I'm going to go ahead and click on this. And it shows me where those markups are.

If I now hover over this markup, it's going to show, notice the blue highlight on the bottom markup, shows me who has done what markup. And it's a great way to, if multiple people make markups, you can see who did what. And what's even nicer here is that, if I click on the Edit or View Trace toggle, get the action icon here, I can make those changes while keeping the markups available on the screen.

Now, all I'm going to do is erase this stuff, and we're going to pretend that I've put in a new door. I'm going to go ahead and click OK. And so the markup is done, and the change has been made. And so that's the enhancement to the trace command. So pretty cool stuff there, tutorials in the handout.

All right, getting back to the presentation here. Let's take a look at one of the-- another great feature for creating markups for AutoCAD drawings while out in the field. And it doesn't even have to be in the field. If you've done any drafting, you've probably received a PDF or photograph with a revision cloud on it and make changes here, make changes there, do this, do that.

And then you're looking at the sheet of paper to make the changes in AutoCAD, looking at the sheet of paper, make the changes in AutoCAD, and you end up getting whiplash. Hey, that's how it was for me. I always had-- I'd get those markups. Well, now we can import any PDFs of a drawing or images of a drawing that have markups on them. And AutoCAD uses an AI to analyze that particular image or PDF, comparing it to the drawing that I'm in, as I want to import it, and it allows me to import and create text or revision clouds in my drawing.

These markups are aligned automatically. And for the most part, this works perfectly. If it doesn't, and every once in a while, it does fail, but you have the option to align the markups manually by moving the markup, aligning it, rotating it, or even scaling it.

But in most cases, as you'll see momentarily, any PDF, PNG, or JPEG will be inserted once the analytics have been done on that object. So before we get into that, I'm just going to let you know that this does make use of the trace environment. And it makes use of this Markup Assist icon. And you can find this Markup Import on the Collaborate tab right next to the Traces palette.

Some new commands, Markup Assist, Markup Import, both of these can be accessed without the dialogue. So if you need to automate things, you can certainly do that. And it does include some new system variables dictating the default. So let's take a look at how this works, pretty cool stuff.

I think I'm going to go back to AutoCAD. OK, Markup Import and Markup Assist mode. We can access these from the Collaborate tab on the ribbon and the traces panel, Markup Import. I'm going to click that.

And it shows me the Select File to import dialog. And here, a colleague has sent me a PNG, which could be, could have sent me a PDF or JPEG as well. Selecting that, it shows me a preview.

And here, it appears we have a Rev Cloud as well as a leader and some text. OK, I'm going to click Open. And AutoCAD analyzes the image, compares it to the drawing, and inserts that selected image.

Now, it gives me the option to either accept this or I can modify it by using move line rotate scale. It's perfect, so I'm going to click Accept. Now, here we have the extent of the image itself. You'll see it has placed it on layer zero.

I've changed to a rev layer. And what we can do here, see how this is kind of faded out from this, if you want to change that, you can do that here. I prefer to keep it right about 15 or so. But you can certainly make it look like the rest of the drawing or go a little further.

Again, 15, 16, 15, whatever, is what I like. I can also then, after all of these [INAUDIBLE], nothing's happening here. Well, you don't even know what to expect. So I'll show you.

I'm going to click on the Edit trace or View Trace toggle. And doing so, while being in this Import Markup mode, I now switch to the Markup Assist mode. And you'll see that the extents of the image are now dashed lines. And we have dashed lines around what AutoCAD has analyzed as markups.

If we zoom in a little here and hover over this dashed line, it shows me, hey, it seems this is a boundary of some kind. Click for options. So I'm going to click for options.

Let's say, looks like it's a boundary. And should I go ahead and insert as a rev cloud? Well, yes, please do. So I click on that, and it has created a revision cloud.

Let's take this one step further. And we'll go ahead and click on this dashed line here as soon as the icon appears. And it says, hey, looks like this is text. So we can modify this if we want. So I'll just do this. Well, let's do 11.03.2022. Oops.

There we go. So we modified the text a little. And now we can insert this as an Mleader, as Mtext, or we can just copy it to the clipboard. I'm going to insert as Mleader. And I could place the leader text right on top of that.

But instead, I kind of want it to be here, where it's a little more prominent and not covering up anything else in the drawing. So I'll pick, and then I'm going to point to the rev cloud. And I placed my mark up. Once I'm done, I just click on this Exit or Close Trace. And voila, that is Markup Import Markup Assist.

All right, so let's talk about some of my favorite commands to wrap up this session here. These are commands and system variables that would make me more productive. And I would be using-- well, most of them, I would be using all the time. There's a couple of favorites. And we're going to talk about these.

I've got tutorials on these as well in the handout. So be sure to go through them. But some of these, you may want to use, others you won't. The first one we're going to talk about is an enhancement to the block palette, where you can rename a block instead of redefining it as you insert it.

Isolation mode, I'll show you how that works. It basically retains the selection after you've ended object isolation. JIGZOOMMAX and JIGZOOMMIN, they're not dances. These here allow you to specify how much of the screen you want to see if you're zoomed in too close to an object or too far out upon insertion of a block.

So there are easy ways to do this with the mouse I'll talk about later during the demo. We'll also talk about ANNOSCALEZOOM. Now, this one is probably one of my favorites.

I'm going to keep you in suspense for a moment. And then enhancement to Mleaders, where you can use existing text in the drawing, extending a vertex without having to reverse a polyline. This has been a much-asked-for request when working with polylines.

Clipboard enhancement, we used to just have copy paste. Now we have cut paste, should be pretty straightforward. And ARCTEXT has been added to AutoCAD LT.

So if you haven't used that, well, no big deal. But if you have and have had errors when opening up ARCTEXT in AutoCAD LT, you'll understand why this is a biggie. So let's take a look at that particular functionality. Let's go into AutoCAD. There we go.

And I am going to go ahead and just quickly open up a drawing here. And let's go. It's actually-- oh, it's right there. Yeah, awkward moment. I've already got it available here.

So the first function, we're actually going to show you three of them here real quick. I have my block palette open. No, that's my trace list command, sorry. I'm going to open up my block palette just by typing I.

And we're going to take a look at these JIGZOOMMAX. So JIGZOOMMIN, yeah, let's start off with that one. Basically, if you look at my command line, you'll see it has a value of 0.

And it allows me to set a value between 0 and 50 for JIGZOOMMIN. So if I'm zoomed in to close to something, if I say I need at least 20% of the drawing screen to see where I'm inserting that block, it's going to zoom out for me. And that's what I'm going to enter here is 20.

Now, JIGZOOMMAX does the same, except if I'm too far out, it's going to zoom in to a specified area that I defined. So I'm going to type in JIGZOOMMAX, two M's, Max. There we go. And here, I'm going to go ahead and enter a value of 50.

Now, let's see how this works. And along with this, we'll take a look at this redefine option. It's not available in the classic insert command. It is available from the tool palette.

So I'm going to go ahead and insert a chair. But I want it to be different than the chair that already exists in this drawing. I'm going to go to my hard drive.

And from there, I'm going to select chair 7. And you'll see it is different here. OK? So I'm going to go ahead and click Open and insert it.

And now, I'm-- oh wait, I've already got this chair 7. This, in turn, this chair right here, is chair 7, actually. So instead of redefining all the blocks in the drawing or not inserting from the hard drive, I can now rename this block to chair 7, parentheses 1.

So I'll go ahead and select that. And I'm going to go ahead and just reference here, reference there. And let's go ahead and just-- I lost my reference, no big deal. I'll pick the insertion point.

And it does, the first time you pick, it's going to zoom you out, because that's what you specified. You could use the mouse wheel, I probably would have. But this is a pretty neat functionality.

Let's go ahead and get that reference this time. All right, so now pick 90, Enter, there it is. Now, that was JIGZOOMMIN and also the redefined function. I'm going to zoom out here a bit, because I've done this a lot. I'm way the heck out here, too lazy to zoom in. And I decide, OK, I need to insert a block.

So yeah, OK, I could zoom in with my mouse wheel. Instead, I'm just going to pick right now. It zooms me in 50% of the screen. That allows me to quickly then pick and 90, Enter. There we go. Oops, must have missed my reference.

But either, way pretty cool stuff. You may want to use your mouse instead. But if you have these pre-defined, these settings, they might come in handy.

All right, so those, two there, three functions, along with the redefine. Now, this one here, I don't know when I would use this. I'm going to go ahead and isolate objects right now.

OK, I'm going to isolate this chair. And what this new enhancement does is, I have this block selected. And when I let AutoCAD, no, I want to end object isolation. It retains that selection.

I've never had a need for this. Maybe you do. Somebody did. So hopefully, it'll help out whoever does need it.

All right. Well, there's certainly more features introduced with AutoCAD 2023, new enhancements. Some of these, I just didn't have time to show in this particular presentation. But they are available for you to review in the handout. Walk through the tutorials for those features, just a few of them.

But the handout's there. The exercise files will be there. Hey look, I really appreciate your time. It's valuable, I know that. And I really hope that I've been able to show you some new functionality in AutoCAD 2023 that's going to make you be a lot more productive. Thank you very much, and have a great day.