AutoCAD Secrets EXPOSED!

JEANNE AARHUS: So while we're waiting the last five minutes, does anybody have any tips and tricks you want to throw out there?

[CHATTER]

You get a prize. Yes?

[CHATTER]

AUDIENCE: I like to turn on the time-sensitive right-click--

JEANNE AARHUS: [INAUDIBLE] so we can hear.

AUDIENCE: OK, sure. I like to turn on the time-sensitive right-click in the Options so that a quick right-click is just like hitting the Enter key. And a 250-millisecond right-click brings up the context menu.

JEANNE AARHUS: Absolutely. Does everybody use the both right-clicks?

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

JEANNE AARHUS: Yes? Or do you turn that off?

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

JEANNE AARHUS: Right? Yes? You don't use the right-click menus?

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

JEANNE AARHUS: Shame. You have two right-clicks. You can do the quick right-click, and what I commonly refer to as the drunken right-click, because that's what it is. You just got to be sluggish. And there's even a setting to tell it how drunk you are. So use both right-clicks, then you can have the best of both worlds.

Thank you for the tip.

Anyone else?

AUDIENCE: I tip my [? welding-- ?] I'm joking.

JEANNE AARHUS: No, that would be OK.

AUDIENCE: [LAUGHTER] One is I like it when you have multiple windows open. And I draw conduits and whatnot, so I want to get to one conduit in the big drawing. So if I highlight it here and click on the cube for the bigger drawing, it'll take me directly to that fitting.

JEANNE AARHUS: That's a good tip. I didn't try that.

AUDIENCE: Yeah, sometimes I got to open that [INAUDIBLE].

JEANNE AARHUS: So you have two viewports. And you're selecting an object in the first viewport. And then what are you doing on ViewCube?

AUDIENCE: In the cube, you just click on that the [INAUDIBLE] window is probably a plan view.

JEANNE AARHUS: So you just pick on top, and it zooms right to it.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

JEANNE AARHUS: All right. I've done that in 3D, but I never thought about doing it in 2D. So excellent. Thank you.

Anyone else? I've got three more minutes. Don't be shy. It doesn't have to be a complex tip.

You know, that's the hard part about putting together classes for tips and tricks because you don't know what is a tip. I have to figure out what don't you know. And I only come up with them in class when you're up there demonstrating something and someone goes, what did you just do? You didn't know that? Oh, it's a new tip.

Yes?

AUDIENCE: We do the Control-Shift to get to your snaps.

JEANNE AARHUS: Oh, yes. Really? Does everybody know you can Control-Shift to get your-- or isn't it Shift-right-click?

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

JEANNE AARHUS: Is it Control-right-click or Shift-right-click? Control-right-click to get to your osnaps for the [? onesies. ?]

Yep. I always have to be careful because I teach MicroStation too. And there is a Shift-right-click. So that's why I said that wrong. Sorry. I always need like a day in between to turn my brain around.

Have any MicroStation users in here? Welcome. Are you handling it, emotionally? Because it's just basically turn everything upside down. Do everything backwards.

You used to be a MicroStation user. Didn't you used to use MicroStation?

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

JEANNE AARHUS: I thought so. Completely abandoned it now?

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

JEANNE AARHUS: I have a few students in the audience, so I kind of know where they came from. And I always laugh when I see a MicroStation person in the room because it's like, this is the wrong conference.

There's more of them coming over. We're going to start. There's a couple in the front. Did I give you a pen? When you sit in the front row in my classes, you get a pen, typically.

AUDIENCE: Thank you.

JEANNE AARHUS: Uh-huh. Not that it fills my front row. But hey, I try.

Well, good morning. And welcome to AutoCAD Secrets Exposed. It's basically a tips and tricks class.

So I have 40 tips and tricks to get through in an hour. Yes, I probably won't get through all of them. But that's OK. You can read them when you get home. And I'd rather have more in the handout than less.

Also as I go through, we'll have a few tips and tricks that I'll throw in on the fly as I think of them as we're going through. I don't mind if you ask questions as we're going through. Or if you think of a tip while I'm going through something, please share. All right? That's what we're here for.

So my name's Jeanne Aarhus. I don't do any PowerPoints. Do you want me to pull up my PowerPoint slides so that I can say that I did? You won't ding me if I don't pull up PowerPoint?

I'm afraid to because my computer blue-screened this morning three times. I was in panic mode, but it booted back up. Thank you.

So I'm from Omaha, Nebraska. And I've been training for way more years than I want to admit-- 35 now. So if you have any questions, let me know.

For those of you who've been in my classes before, I will tell you this is my last AU, so thank you. I'm retiring from conferences. I told them that I would come back next year, but only as an attendee, as a visitor to socialize, with no work involved.

Not that it changed what I did last night, did it? I got to bed by what-- 1 o'clock? I can sleep Monday.

Oh, we've got a whole slew of people coming in at the last minute. There are a couple of seats up here. Oh, are these people all the people that were waiting? Oh, OK. Yeah, they didn't give me a bigger room this year.

Who just came in? You did. You did. Front-row people always get a prize. See, normally when I do this class, I get over 200 people. But they put me in this tiny little room this year, and they didn't even let me repeat the class, so we'll just see.

Who came in just right now? You get a pen if you sit in the front row. So see, being late is a good thing.

AUDIENCE: $5 would work better.

JEANNE AARHUS: So what?

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

JEANNE AARHUS: If you sit up here, then you get to do it. You could. You can drive, and I'll just talk. Yeah, when I first started doing training, my husband was so happy. He's like, you'll be talking all day, and when you come home you'll be tired.

[LAUGHTER]

He thought, this is going to be great. The problem was it just built up my stamina. So now I can talk for like 10 hours straight and it doesn't affect me. So it kind of backfired on him.

So everybody knows you can download the handout, right? So you don't really have to take a lot of notes. My e-mail is on the handout. If you can't find the handout, e-mail me. If you need more instructions-- on some of the ones that I thought you needed step-by-step instructions, I try to put them in there.

But like I said, if you have a question, can't get it to work, send me an e-mail. I'm semi-retired. I have lots of time. I can help. Or if you have a tip, send it to me. I'll forward it on to whoever does this class next year.

So the first thing we're going to look at is-- and this is just a conglomerate. It's just a glob of things. I try to categorize them. So I've got a lot of dimensioning ones and just miscellaneous tips. Out of the 40 tips, my goal is you go home with five of them that are useful to you.

And since we have a room that's just divided into two, those of you who've been here before, what's the rule?

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

JEANNE AARHUS: Those are the ooh's. And these are the ah's. Tell me what's a good tip so I know what to keep in and what to take out.

I now have a list of 300 tips. So I never know which ones to put in and which ones to take out. So you kind of help me by telling me that.

I'm also probably going to start doing my tips and tricks classes-- who has a subscription to lynda.com? I'm going to start doing classes on there next year. So you'll see some of them on there.

So the first one is DIM Layer. This is new in 2017. And I wish they'd have had this one a long time ago because when you're on the Annotate tab over here, and you're doing your dimensions, they actually have a setting now that allows you to set your dimension-- I don't remember what I have mine set to at the moment.

So let me just type in DIM Layer. And it's set to use Current. If I have a specific layer that I'm supposed to put dimensions on, you can set that there.

Let me check what my spelling is here. Let's go over here. This one will have one-- Dimensions.

So if I type in my DIM Layer-- oops. I made my text big. So hopefully you can see that. And I'll just type in Dimensions. And now, no matter what my current layer is, when I come in and I place any dimension command, whatever it is, it's going to be on the dimension layer.

So now you don't have to change your layer anymore. I think we should be able to assign every command to a layer. Wouldn't that be cool if you could say line is always supposed to be or-- I think that would be helpful. But you can use tool pallets, too, to automate that.

Overlapping dimensions-- and this includes all old and new versions of AutoCAD. So I usually ask, is anybody on 2014, 2015 still? A couple of you. So in the handout it tells you if this tip works for that version. Everybody else in '16 and '17? Yes?

Oh, here's a tip that's not documented. Who's on '17? Have you loaded the update 1 that just came out? Don't. It broke a couple of things.

And you'll see it pop up down here in the bottom of my right-- I get a balloon that keeps popping up about some visualizations thing or whatever. And I can't make it go away no matter what I do. And that didn't start happening until I did update 1. So I don't know that anything got fixed that is worth that interruption. So that's an undocumented tip from the class.

Overlapping dimensions-- is everybody using this new dimension command in 2016 and 2017? It's a little weird. You may not have transitioned to it yet, so let me show you a couple of things that's really nice about it.

I admit I still use dimensional linear and aligned, probably most of the time. But this one's really handy if I actually need to move stuff automatically. So when you pick this command, it's like an automatic thing.

Whatever you hover over, it figures out what you're hovering on, and it gives you the appropriate command. So if I would pick here, it would-- oh, she's not supposed to give me that there. It's not perfect. There we go.

See, it would give me a linear here. It would give me a diameter here. And there's-- you have to kind of fuss over it a little bit till it highlights the correct one.

So if I wanted to do this linear dimension and I select this line, then it gives me some options with my drunken right-click to-- come on. Let's go to-- I'm not sure why that's doing that. Let me try that again.

Hover-- there we go. Pick it. Come up.

And I'm going to place it here. And then it allows me to-- now, it's not giving me my move away. Why is it not giving me my move away? It should have given it to me on my-- oh, I know why. Hold on-- because I'm talking and not looking at what I'm doing.

I'm going to pick right here on top of another dimension. And if I pick right there, then it wants me-- I wasn't paying attention to what I was doing-- then it gives me the Move Away, Break Up, Replace. So let's say that I wanted to take those two 1 dimensions and make them a 2. I could say Replace it, and it replaces them.

If I wanted to move them-- which is really most of the time when I would use it-- is I'd click on here. And I would say Move Away. And it automatically moves things away from it.

Now, the bad news is it is a little tough to control how it moves it. I had enough space for it to move it down, so it did. If you didn't have enough space to move it down, it would push them up. So it depends on how far away your dimensions are.

See, like right here, I have enough distance here that with that DIM spacing, it could move it down instead of pushing it up. And that's what happened here. So I did that on purpose so you'd understand why it did that. So just remember that's what that one does.

But you have to pick right on another one. And then it'll ask you what you want to do with it. You can also break it up, and it'll break that up and give me 2 and 2.

Isn't that cool? OK, if you don't like dimensions, then OK. So anyway, those are all in there.

Another one that I like to talk about is the annotation scales. Is everybody using annotation scales so that your text and dimensions and everything fix automatically? So I always look for the things that don't work the way I want them to. So basically if you come in here and you pick a bunch of scales-- everybody's had that, right, where you get all these extra scales on there just because of how you've been working. And you didn't really know what scale you were going to use initially.

And now that I know what scale I'm going to use, I want to easily get rid of all of those. The problem is if I come in and I select Leaders, and I say Select Similar to go select all of them in my drawing, it doesn't allow me to get to annotation scale and delete the ones I don't want. It's like, well, where is it?

If you pick just one, it lets you go in here and add and delete scales. So why can't I do that on more than one? Because they didn't think of it.

So here's how you get around it. If you select everything-- if you come over here to your Properties dialog, and you come over to here, if you click right there on that button, you can get rid of all of them on all of them. I see people pick one at a time and cleaning them up, and it's like-- oh, stop.

Quicker multi-line editing-- I'll just use this file. And if anybody wants my files, you can have them. Usually I don't have complicated files, so you can replicate it with your own drawings.

If I want to come in and I want to edit a leader-- so let's go ahead and get rid of all of those because I don't want-- I think I have to get rid of those three. So now what I want to do is I want to actually modify just one leader. Now, I'm not going to do the easy stuff, like you just want to move it or you just want to add and remove.

Everybody knows you can add and remove leaders. But did you know that you could come in and you could hold the Control key down and pick and choose the leaders you want to get rid of and then just hit the Delete key? You don't really need that command.

The other thing you can do is if you hold the Control-- now, this changed a little bit. So if you're in 2015 or lower, you used to be able to come in here and just select the arrowhead and then replace it using Properties. In 2016 and '17, they kind of changed it.

When you hold the Control key down and you pick, it's going to pick the whole thing. So you have to pick the whole leader line. But you can still come over here into Properties and change what the arrowhead is and change the scale.

So if I came down here and I said I wanted to make it a dot-- it's small and I wanted to make it bigger, you can come in and just change one arrowhead without-- I see people delete, remove the leader and place a new leader-- no. And you don't even have to have a style that uses the dot. Just change it on the fly.

What if you wanted to change one of these two straight, instead of curved? The same thing. Select it. Come over here and change your type from spline to straight. Again, don't worry about a style. Just tweak it on the fly.

New in 2017 is the ability-- I thought I could do this in 2016 but I couldn't. I was surprised. I thought I'd been doing it longer than that. You can now wrap your text in 2017 right inside the dimensions.

So if you have complicated dimension text that you're putting on there, you can go ahead and just double-click to edit it, just like normal text, and wrap it as needed. Be careful if you wrap it too wide. If your dimension style is set up-- I would call correctly-- then what it's going to do is it's going to pull it out with the leader line.

Oh, my straight leader line is not growing like it should. But it'll pull it out with the leader line because it won't fit anymore. That's kind of a 2017 thing.

Dimension breaks-- maybe I'm dating myself, but back in the old drafting days by hand this is a no-no, correct? How many of you are still exploding them to clean it up? Nobody?

Is everybody using DIMBREAK now? You know about DIMBREAK? Because in DIM, you have the option here to come in and do the DIMBREAK-- see, where is it?

No, that's not it. That's not it. Where is it? It's on here somewhere. Oh, see, I'm a keyboard person.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

JEANNE AARHUS: There it is. Thank you. I'm a keyboard person, so sometimes I have to figure out where it is. Who still keys their commands in?

Yes! I don't feel so archaic now. I do. I just key stuff in. I can't help it.

So if you use DIMBREAK, what it asks you to do is select the dimension that you want to add the break to. So I want to add it to both of these-- because I'm going to have to add it to both of these. So I'm going to go ahead and pick that and then pick that.

Oops. I fat-finger it? I sure did. That one. And then it'll break it.

Oh, you know why it's not? Because I have to do the other one, too. There we go.

Now, there is a change request for you. Shouldn't you be able to cross any window and select them both? Duh, right? So get on the [? Augy ?] wishlist and tell them, simple stuff like that can make all the difference.

If I wanted to have a dimension out here but I don't-- and this came from when I was helping some mechanical manufacturing people. They wanted to place a dimension that didn't have any text in it. So there's a couple of ways to accomplish this.

How do you place a dimension but not have any text in it, because it gets there automatically, right? You can give it a space, and then get rid of that.

That will work. And then how do you get it back if you want it back?

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

JEANNE AARHUS: Less than and greater than will always bring back the true dimension of any dimension. So when people do what they're not supposed to and they type in 2.0 because they overwrite it. And then when you go to modify it-- the number is not updating-- you just put back in the less than and greater than. Later on, I'm going to show you a tip where you can identify all dimensions in your drawing that aren't true and fix them. So put in a space.

The other thing is if you do it a lot, you can set up a dimension style that is blank so that you just swap it out. You don't have to edit it.

Now what I did, if I go into DIMSTYLE and we look at Blank, when you get to your text-- which one did I put it on, primary? Right here. Right there, if you do backslash h, it removes all text from your dimension, kind of like the backslash x.

What does backslash x do when you put backslash x in a dimension?

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

JEANNE AARHUS: It allows you to put something below without breaking the dimension line. Yep, absolutely. So I always make a wrapping one for that, too. The wrapping is going to work a little bit better now in 2017, so I may not use backslash x anymore.

Another one-- did you know you could trim dimensions and extend dimensions? I'm always surprised people don't know this. This is like-- I don't even know how far back this goes.

So if I go ahead and I want to trim this dimension right here, I'm going to go ahead and select-- let's just select all of this. And then I'm going to trim this one. No, wait. That one is not going to-- is it not hitting it?

Let's do a simpler one-- get rid of this guy. That's why, because they're all different. I will do trim on the top one.

So I'm going to trim. And if I select right here, it'll trim it back. Oops. If I select it again, it'll trim it back. If I hold the Shift key down, it'll extend and bring it back. So you can trim and extend dimensions.

And then hopefully you've done DIMSPACING. You ever run into a drawing that was like that? And you go to the person who did that and you go, did you ever take a drafting class? You failed Drafting 101, because you're not supposed to do that.

DIMSPACE will automatically space your dimensions based on the base dimension. So I'll pick this one. And then I'm going to pick both of those. And you can do the auto or you can type in a distance. If I do auto, I'm going to do 0.5 first, and that'll space that out if I know what the spacing is supposed to be because I think it was already set to auto.

Now, if I say DIMSPACE, and that's the base one that's not going to move and then I want to apply it to all of those, and I go with auto, it takes a factor of your text size and puts them as close together as they can. That's what auto does. So it just squishes them as close as it can based on your text type.

AUDIENCE: So that spacing also scales up and down?

JEANNE AARHUS: Yes. Oh, you mean when you do annotation scale? No, no. Oh, do I have it on? I do.

Let's do 1. Oh, you know what? These aren't annotation. Shame on me. Let's make them annotation real quick.

No, it says it is. They're associated. Let's make them annotative. No, I don't think so.

Yeah, it doesn't. It shouldn't-- yes, it should. Does it? No. I had to check because I thought, well, maybe they snuck that into 2017.

Here's a forgotten dimension command. You have a part that you're trying to dimension. And if you just use dimension-- actually this is dimension linear. So if I just do a linear dimension from here to here-- let's do dimension aligned. There we go-- from here to here, that's not really what you want to get, is it?

Well, there's an old command called DIMROTATED. And you can specify the angle of the dimension line before you pick your points. So I can come in here and I can say I want it to be at that angle.

Now when I pick from here to here, it allows me to bring it out parallel. It's a key-in-only command. It's just an old one. I don't know why it's gone.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

JEANNE AARHUS: In which one, DIMLINEAR or DIMALIGNED?

AUDIENCE: DIMLINEAR [INAUDIBLE].

JEANNE AARHUS: DIMLINEAR--

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE].

JEANNE AARHUS: So if I pick this one and I pick this one-- oops, right there. Oh, come on. Get away from my ViewCube.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

JEANNE AARHUS: Yes, that would do it, too-- to there to there. Yes, excellent. Where are you? That's a good way to get to it. I've used the old one for years.

Where are you? There.

AUDIENCE: Us Omaha people are pretty smart.

JEANNE AARHUS: Oh, are you from Omaha? Welcome.

[LAUGHTER]

I always knew Omaha was smart.

So now we're looking at-- just a couple of things to point out about 2017. Actually, this came in 2015. If I come over here and I go to-- which tab is it on-- Object Snap. I think it's under User Preferences. No, it's under Drafting-- and you look at your Object Snaps, there's a setting right here that will allow you to ignore your dimension extension lines.

How many of you have accidentally snapped to an extension line?

So if you turn this on-- and I don't think it's on by default. If you turn this on, you don't have to hit F3 and turn off your snaps. When you get too close to an extension line, just say no, never snap to an extension line. I never want to. And it's fine because if you were going to continue a dimension, here if you wanted to continue a dimension, what would you do?

Would you go up and pick DIMCONTINUE? How many still come up here and pick-- where is it? Right here. Do you still come up and pick this?

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

JEANNE AARHUS: Yes? No? Hopefully the answer is no because if you do this command right here and you continue a dimension, it's going to continue with your current dimension style, which is not necessarily the dimension style that that dimension is. Instead of doing that, if you just select this and hover, you can continue the dimension using the same style as that dimension, regardless of what your current one is.

Yay! I didn't even know I wanted that one until they came up with it. And I thought, that's way smarter.

OK, I haven't gotten a single ooh and ah. Have you not learned anything yet?

AUDIENCE: Ah. [INAUDIBLE]

JEANNE AARHUS: You can always ah without an ooh.

AUDIENCE: Oh, OK. Ah.

JEANNE AARHUS: So I'm just hoping you've learned something so far. I mean, we're only so far through.

AUDIENCE: Ooh. Ah.

JEANNE AARHUS: Very good. See, I don't know if you're learning anything. It's like, wake up. Come on.

AUDIENCE: Last day of AU. [INAUDIBLE]

JEANNE AARHUS: I know. That's why I got to wake you up. I get it. Get some coffee.

This is one I-- again, I don't know what you don't know. So if I was going to come in here, and I'm going to stretch-- first of all, let me show you what's affecting this. If I right-click here and I look at my osnaps, you can see that I have endpoint, midpoint, quadrant, and intersection.

Now, there's a couple here that are not turned on that are going to affect how this works. And I'll show you what it is. If I run my Stretch command, and I select these objects, and I stretch, I can't really control the angle, can I?

So what I see people doing is they try to rotate their views. They try to draw geometry or something to snap to-- like, no. All you have to do is you can do Stretch.

You can do your Control-right-click and pick Extension. I'm blind this morning. Where's Extension?

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

JEANNE AARHUS: Thank you. Extension. And now if I-- Oh, it got rid of that. Oh, it was trying to show how to use your tip. It de-selected it.

Let's Select. Now let's do Extension. And if you pick from here out-- it's not doing it. So you're going to have to turn it on running. I apologize.

So I'm going to come here to Osnap. I'm going to turn on Extension. You can also turn on Parallel-- would help you do this. But I prefer Extension. I almost always have Extension on.

So now if I stretch, no matter what it is, Extension will give me a [? lock-in ?] axis. So just leave Extension on all the time. It doesn't hurt. It doesn't get in your way.

One of the best things they came up with-- and because I'm getting so many files open, let's get rid of some stuff before I crash. So one of the great enhancements in 2017 was what? Associated center lines.

So those of you who haven't upgraded, this alone would make me upgrade to 2017. So you've got two associated center lines here. It's on your Annotate tab. And you can do a center mark or a center line.

So let's do the center line first. And if I come-- it says select my first line here. Select my second line here. Now, if the lines are equal, can you see that it's only highlighting part of it? Then it will only give you the center line that length.

Now, if the line-- I'm going to join those up to show you that here's something that they need to fix. So now that's all one piece. If I do center line here and here-- oh, it's still-- it's not going to let me.

See how it only picks up part of it? If you have uneven lines, it's still not doing quite what I want it to do. But it is associated. So just extend it.

I don't have a better solution for that for you yet than to just-- well, you wouldn't take that all the way out there. You would take it to about there. So just extend the way you need to.

And then if I come in and I modify this-- I'll modify the bottom line here. I didn't really want that to do that. So I'm going to get rid of this little piece.

How do I pick that and just get rid of it without exploding my polyline?

AUDIENCE: Control key.

JEANNE AARHUS: Control key. So it allowed me to get rid of that extra grip that was interfering with what I wanted to do. So I'm going to come in, and I'm going to modify this now. And I'm going to pick this.

I'm going to come straight down. Oh, great. It's not closed. But pretend that was closed.

And for some reason because I did that now-- bear with me. I got to do my JOIN. Does everybody do JOIN now instead of PEDIT? It Yes?

AUDIENCE: No.

JEANNE AARHUS: Because PEDIT'S easier-- I mean, JOIN is much easier than PEDIT.

AUDIENCE: It makes lines [INAUDIBLE].

JEANNE AARHUS: What do you mean it makes lines?

AUDIENCE: It makes splines. The end result is splines [INAUDIBLE].

JEANNE AARHUS: But if you explode this, it's a line. So I'm not sure how you're getting splines. It should be lines.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

JEANNE AARHUS: That's probably because it's a 3-D polyline.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

JEANNE AARHUS: Oh, really?

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

JEANNE AARHUS: Send me an e-mail on that after and let me investigate that so that I remember.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

JEANNE AARHUS: I would understand that if it was a 3-D poly, but not a polyline. So let me bring this back. And so I'll just do it like this.

I'm going to do my center line from here to here. See, it doesn't give me quite the length that I might want. And now if you come in and you just modify this a little bit-- oops, see how it moves?

It will keep itself centered. Woo-hoo! I'm sorry, but I think that's cool.

How many times have you had to move those? You'd have had to turn around and do a move at the midpoint, mid between two points. And it's like, where's that been for 20 years?

Also if you do a smart center line for the center mark, if you come in and you take these and you just move the circle wherever, they stay associated to the circle. And if you change the size of your circle-- obviously the middle doesn't move-- but it also associates it and lengthens the lines for you now. So it's like, I might even stay into CAD for that one. So associated center lines.

And there are some settings-- in the handout, I tried to put in all of the system variables that affect how these work. So if you look in the handouts, all the variables that control-- like on this one you've got-- when you put these in what layer do they come in? Like, remember the DIMLAYER?

There's a variable called center layer that whenever you place a center line, it's going to know exactly what layer you want to put them on automatically without you having to do anything. It also lets you define the line type that you want it to automatically use with the line type scale. It also lets you customize the length of the overlap outside of the circles and past the length of the line that you're selecting.

So if both of those lines were the same length, then it would know how far past that it wants to go. But when you have two uneven lines, you're just going to have to fudge it. It's still associated. You have to manually lengthen it.

So there's a whole bunch of settings that control how this works for you. And if I check, they are all defined as drawing variables.

Does everybody know what that means? If it's a drawing system variable, where do you have to define it?

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

JEANNE AARHUS: In your file. That means if I go to another file, my settings aren't the same. So when you read in this-- if it says it's saved in the drawing, make sure you save it in your template file so that you inherit that for every file you create after that. If it says it's in the registry, then you change it once and it's changed on your computer, and it doesn't matter what file you're in. And that's more of a personal setting for your computer.

You can now snap to gaps. You just have to snap to a dash and then move it over. So now if you come in and you draw a line, if you happen to hit a gap-- let's do nearest because that will be the only way that I can show it.

See how it will snap all along there? So I can pick anywhere in a gap, and then I can go up to another gap. Whereas before, it would have gone to there. Now you can actually snap to your gaps.

AUDIENCE: Ah.

JEANNE AARHUS: It's the little things that matter, isn't it?

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

JEANNE AARHUS: Well, it's not that there's not a part there. If I'm trying to snap to a center line, maybe I'm trying to place a dimension, or maybe there's times when I need it to be at the gap.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

JEANNE AARHUS: Yeah, perpendicular, yep. And it would never let me do it before. And I would always have to place it and then just grip edit it and move it where I needed it to be.

Yep. You can turn it off if you don't like it. It is on by default.

Here's one. And this is one of those where-- I shouldn't have put this in there. I should've made it just you guys know, the people that attended.

So the guy who sits next to you who irritates you at work leaves his desk-- this is a new 2017. There's no useful purpose for this other than to irritate your coworkers. So he leaves. And you type in Cursor Type, New Variable, and you change it to 1. He now gets his Windows cursor, and he'll never get a crosshair. And he'll be wondering--

AUDIENCE: [? Ew. ?] Ah.

JEANNE AARHUS: -- why can't I draw a line? Where's my crosshair? I mean, it's working. But he's not going to figure that out. I love stuff like that you can do to people.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

JEANNE AARHUS: The what?

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

JEANNE AARHUS: Oh, yes. If you change-- here's one. I didn't put this one in. It's called MTJIG, yeah. Everybody know about MTJIG string-- when he walks away? Who doesn't know about this one?

Oh, this is even more fun. So when you place text, you always get the A-B-C. So when he leaves, you can say, you are an idiot. And he won't know it-- let me change my cursor type back-- until he picks Text.

Oh, I've got to turn off my dynamics here. Where is it? Oh, I don't even have them turned on down here. Come on. Where is it?

Oh, don't you hate the icons? I still want my text back. Not line. Where is my dynamic input?

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

JEANNE AARHUS: But I don't see it. It's not turned on. It says it's turned on. I'm supposed to have all of them turned on.

Oh, it's up here. It's wrapping right there. I don't like it when it wraps. But my computer is being weird since it blue-screened and now it won't save this where my status bar and everything is merged together.

It just keeps popping up here. Don't ask me why it's doing that. I can't explain that.

But so now you turn off your dynamic so it won't be hidden. Now when he picks the place text-- oh, did I make it too long? MTJIG string will make it-- yeah, it didn't like it.

It didn't like the word "idiot." I wonder if they're trying to prevent us from being mean. So we'll just say--

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

JEANNE AARHUS: Just say, go home.

[LAUGHTER]

You can come up with something creative. I have to be a little politically correct.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

JEANNE AARHUS: Yeah, that's MTJIG string. They gave us a boring A-B-C to start with.

Dynamic UCS-- is everybody doing dynamic UCS? Now, if you're in 3-D, you probably say yes. But what I find is people that are in 2-D are saying no. So the dynamic UCS works great for 2-D, as well as for 3-D.

So there's a couple of command options that you need to know about that aren't obvious. So if I come in here and I do my dynamic UCS, it is-- I'll turn my dynamic input off. And there it is, right there, the one with the little-- I think it's supposed to be a lightning bolt. I'm not sure, but whatever that little symbol is. DUCS was much more obvious, wasn't it? Do you guys remember the text?

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE].

PRESENTER: You can't get it back anymore. You guys need to-- you know what you need do? You need to get on there and complain and say look, bring us the text back because these icons--

AUDIENCE: Suck?

PRESENTER: I won't say the word. Yes, correct. They're too much the same. So anyway you've got your dynamic UCS. Now, when you're in 3D, that's obvious why you're using it because-- I'll just use the circle command. And when you're doing it that way, you can see it's automatically aligning with faces.

So I get that in a 3D world. That's obvious. But what about in a 2D world? You see, when you hover on a line, it doesn't automatically line up with it. But there are a couple of-- and if you look at your command line, there are some commands available down here that they're not telling you about.

There's some extra command options. One of them is called the E option, which that one will actually select it to any object type. So let's see, did I do E? No, let me pick this here. I'll do R first.

So 3P-- well, 3P's there now. I'm trying to get E to work, E option. And it should let me pick a point. It's not. OK, I'm trying to think. Why is E not letting me do it? I just did it, so I know it works. And it's a user error going on here.

Let's just do a line. And then I'll do E. I don't know why that's doing that. I just did it yesterday and showed somebody. And I have it in the handout. What it does is it lets you align to any type of object, not just a 3D one.

I'm not sure why it's telling me it's not there, because it's definitely not working today. I have no-- I'm sorry. I apologize. I will figure that one out. And I'll try to send an email out. I'll have access to all your emails for about a week, where I can post out notes to you. So I'll try to figure that out and post out the answer to that for you. Sorry.

Or if you wait a week and I have the answer, I'll also update the handout. Because I know it just worked. I just did it yesterday. I was showing somebody. So I'm trying to think what am I doing stupid? It's a stupid user trick is what it is. And I'm like, OK, what in my brain is malfunctioning?

AUDIENCE: Ah.

PRESENTER: I know.

[LAUGHTER]

It does happen. It does happen. Everybody know about last point? Yes, no, don't know? Basically, if you-- I'll just do a line. That'll be easier. If I do a line here and I want to start another line, one of the things that you can do-- or if I want to place a circle-- what you can do is you can type in last, and it'll automatically go-- I'll do a line because I know it works with line-- it'll go to your last point.

OK, that is weird because who knows last works? Right? I'm not doing anything wrong there.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE].

PRESENTER: I shouldn't have to.

AUDIENCE: I think it's going to a [INAUDIBLE] instead of--

[INTERPOSING VOICES].

PRESENTER: Nope, that didn't work either. Let me start here. No, because then I have a new point. It's not last anymore. OK, I'm not going to exit AutoCAD to fix this because I'm afraid that it'll blue screen again.

But, yeah, if you type in last at any point, there's a thing called last point. And what it does is recalls your last point. So you don't have to snap to something again, especially if it's in a real congested area of your drawing and you don't want to zoom in or zoom out in order to get to it. Just type in last, and it automatically goes to your last point.