AutoCAD Secrets Exposed

PRESENTER: OK, can you hear me?

AUDIENCE: Yeah.

PRESENTER: Is it that time? So how was everybody's first day at AU yesterday? Good?

AUDIENCE: Yeah.

PRESENTER: Good?

AUDIENCE: Good.

PRESENTER: All right. I require noise. All right. And I love it when the room is divided into two because I don't know what's a good tip or a bad tip, so if you see something that you didn't know, feedback is helpful.

So you guys will be the oohs and you'll be the ahhs.

AUDIENCE: Ahh.

PRESENTER: All right. Do we need to practice that?

AUDIENCE: Yes.

[LAUGHTER]

AUDIENCE: Ooh.

PRESENTER: All right.

AUDIENCE: Ahh.

PRESENTER: All right. All right. So give me feedback. Let me know what's a good tip. Because I need to know what to do next time. Right.

Now, how many of you were here last year? Anybody in the class last year? Oh, quite a few of you.

Well, thank you for coming back. The good news is I think I have one repeated tip. All the rest are different. All right.

AUDIENCE: Ahh.

AUDIENCE: Ooh.

AUDIENCE: Ahh.

[LAUGHTER]

PRESENTER: And this class, most of it is older tips, just a few are the newer ones. Because you've got lots of classes that teach you the new tips. Right. So I want to know the stuff that if you'd known, you could have done it 10 years ago. You could have been doing it all along. Right.

Because when I learn something new the first thing I do is go, so how long could I have been doing that? Right. And I did learn two new tips this year. So I was excited.

When you've been doing it for 30 years, a tip is pretty exciting. All right. OK. So if you don't know who I am, my name's Jeanne Aarhus. And I'm very happy to be here because for me, 50 degrees is exceedingly warm because I'm from Nebraska and it's 31 there this morning. At least it's going to get above freezing for the first time in five days. All right.

You can read all that later. But that's about me. I teach and train and consult in both Autodesk and Bentley products. So that's how I earn my living, I work for me. So when I don't like my boss, it's really difficult to reprimand them. OK.

You guys already read that or you wouldn't be here. So my goal today is that you will walk away with at least five new tips that you didn't know that you can use regularly. All right. So hopefully I'll get through all 50. But I always put extra tips in there because I never know how fast I'll talk.

Those of you who have been in my class know I can talk really fast. Right. Good news is it's being recorded. So you can go back and play it again when you forgot what I said. Because believe me by Thursday, the brain cells you have today will have died. All right.

So you go back and you watch it again. And then you can remember. All right. OK. So let's find out what we can do. That's all I do with PowerPoint, sorry. I'm not a PowerPoint person. I like to do it live.

Oops. That was the wrong button to push. There we go. All right. Wake up the computer.

So for those of you who are online, this class is being recorded and being broadcast live. So welcome to everybody who's online. And, again, this is just a collection of tips. And download the handout, there is a handout with step-by-step instructions on how to do some of this. So you don't have to take a bunch of notes today. All right. Yes.

[LAUGHTER]

I know what it's like. About next Wednesday, you're going to be like, oh, what was that I thought was so cool and I've forgotten? OK. So the first thing, I've got a bunch of files here. We'll be jumping back and forth.

MTEXT, we all have to use MTEXT. All right. And of course, everybody knows you can double click and edit. But there's a couple of things that I like to point out that sometimes are buried in the upgrades that you may not have run into. So I'm going to right click and go to Columns. And we all know we have Columns.

If you use the Dynamic Columns and the Auto Height, I want to go ahead and show you a couple things that you can control. So first of all, if you look at this-- oops, double click. There's a little icon right down here that you can use to separate that.

Did I not turn that on? Columns, Dynamic, Auto Height. There we go. It's not set to 2, obviously. Come on. Don't you love it when the first tip doesn't work right?

That really is no good. There's another setting, that should have worked. There we go. OK. Don't know why it didn't work the first time. But when you go ahead and you move this around, all right, and then by default, you don't have any control initially over what the spacing is between the columns. But how you control that is if you just use the arrow over here to control your paragraph width, that's how you can change what the spacing is between the column.

And then when you wrap it, it will maintain the distance that you specified. All right. So you have to use this little button right here. Everybody tries to always use this one. That doesn't really work for what you want. All right. Not major, but if you've not run into it. OK.

Text Frames. Now, this one is actually a new tip in 2016. How many of you are in 2016? Oh, that's impressive. OK. So in 2016, you have a new frame that you can put around your text. So if I select this piece of text and I go to Properties, you will see that right here you have a Text Frame option in your Properties now, where you could turn it on.

And the secret is how do you control the spacing between the text and the frame? Well, if you go ahead and Edit this and you right click and go to Background Mask, even though I'm not using the mask, this is your spacing. All right. So if I change that to a 1-- oops, not 10, 1. And then I won't actually use it. I'll turn it off.

That still is what it actually uses. So here you can see some of the examples that I did, where I've got 1.5 and 2. Now if you're not in 2016 and you're in any of the previous versions, I want to show you my tip that I used to use for box text that was dynamic. So that when you modify it, it grows and shrinks with you. This is actually a leader.

So what you need to do is you need to make a leader type with no leader. All right. That's the trick. You got to figure out how to misuse and abuse AutoCAD. Right. So if you look at this, I'll go ahead and show you what my leader looks like, the style.

You come up here. I have a standard boxed leader. And, yes, it should be annotative, by the way. If you come in here, I don't have anything turned on here. There's no leader points. All right. But one of the things that you do need to do is you need to come in and you need to specify your arrowhead size.

And the reason you have to do this-- I'll show you in a minute-- you also need to be able to specify your landing distance and a couple of those other settings because they control things that you'll do with it later in some of the spacing. All right. And, yes, it should be annotative.

So then if that's my current text size, when I use my leader command, it actually lets me draw the box with no leader. And you just type in your text. All right. And it automatically has a box around it.

And if you want to modify it, it'll adjust accordingly. Now, the reason I like to have those other settings defined is it can be kind of nice to select it and right click and add a leader down the road if I need to. So it's nice if those settings are actually defined. Right.

If you ever need to. But you don't have to have a leader defined on a leader. Just use the text settings. OK. And all the instructions on how to do that are all in the handout. OK.

Superscript. Everybody knows how to do the typical superscript, right? Because now it's in the MTEXT editor. Is everybody using MTEXT now more than DTEXT? That didn't sound very good.

AUDIENCE: Yes.

PRESENTER: OK. Because MTEXT is actually pretty functional now. If you double click on this, everybody I hope knows that you can just highlight this and you can hit Superscript or Subscript. Right. I think that part's obvious. All right.

What's not necessarily obvious is how you can do some of this other subscripting and superscript. So here, this is how-- and you can do these for years. This has been there for years. You just had to know the trick.

If you take text that looks like this, Top/Bottom, and you double click that and you make that into a fraction, what the slash will do-- so I"m going to come up here and I'm going to stack the fraction-- is it will actually give you text in the fraction. So I used to work with utilities. We had a lot of text that were fractions, not numbers that were fractions.

You can also do this one if you do the same thing and you stack it, it'll give you the diagonal fraction with text. And then these here if you select this, these are more like the old way of doing the superscript and subscript. That one will allow you to, with the up carrot there, will allow you to just make it a stacked fraction with no line. And then right here, again, I would do this one different.

You could highlight just that portion and stack it. And that would give you the subscript. But now these two down here are actually easier just to use the buttons that are up here at the top. Make sense? All right. These three here are the ones that most people don't know they can do. OK.

I haven't hit one yet, huh? You guys all knew all this. OK. Clearing Attributes. Now, I don't usually include a list routine in my secrets. But I loved this one so much that I thought I have to make sure everybody knows about it.

In the handout will tell you the website where you can go download it, it's free. Or you email me, I'll set it to you because it's free. But if you wanted to clear out a attribute field, in the past you double click on it and you'd have to go ahead and delete that to clear out each one. Right. So that took how many clicks? Like four clicks.

If you run a command called [? At ?] Wipe, which is free, and you just go ahead and pick the attribute, it just wipes it out. Isn't that--

AUDIENCE: Ahh.

PRESENTER: Yep. I've been using that one. And I thought, OK, I got to make sure everybody knows about that. I hadn't done this one for a while, and I though, ah, I got to put that one out there. So that one's free so download it. That's the only one I have in the secrets that you have to actually go get something to get it to work.

But free is always good. OK. This one I did repeat from last year because I keep getting requests on how to make this. This is actually a block that has has a field that will read the insertion point of the block. So if I go ahead and I add this one. I'll select it and put Add Selected.

You can see what the block looks like by default. If I come over here and I snap to something. And I'll just go Enter, Enter, Enter. Oops, I didn't really want that to be at an angle but, all right, see it picks up the insertion point? And my insertion point is that the little dot on the end of the leader. OK.

If I take this and I move it or let's just copy it. Oops. I hit the button too quick. Copy. Come on, Copy. Oop, I went passed it. Sorry, better read, huh? Copy. Sometimes you can't click. There we go. Copy.

And you see I made one for XY as well. Now, it doesn't look like it necessarily worked. But if I re-gen, they'll all update with their insertion points. So I have any civil people out there? Great way to label your points that you need to label. All right. Now, how did I make that?

If we edit that block. And we come in here and we look at-- let's just look at X. All right. It's a field. It's the insertion point field. And if I select that and I go to Edit field, you'll see that I did an object and I selected my object, which was my piece of my field. It's a block placeholder, which means it's going to look at something about the block when the block is inserted.

I went looked for the position. I specified how I wanted the units to be displayed. And then I selected that I wanted that one to be the X value. And I did the exact same thing for the X, the Y, and the Z. All right. And then you pick OK, OK. And that's basically what you have in your block.

And then this here is just actually a piece of text to label it. So these three right here are the X, Y, and Z fields. All right. OK.

Did you know, this is an oldie but a goody, did you know you could trim your dimensions? I'm going to run the Trim Command. And I can just select everything here. First of all, don't you love the new preview? Right. Yes. But you can come in here and trim your dimensions. Did you know that? All right.

Well then if you didn't know it, isn't it an ooh or an ahh? I know, it's early in the morning. Did you not eat breakfast? Or actually, did you not get your coffee? All right.

2016. This is another 2016 one that I wanted to throw in. We all edit our dimensions. But of course, you never edit the real true value away. Right. Of course not. Because we're all exactly precise on how we draft.

If you double click on the dimension text now, it actually opens up a functional MTEXT editor, which allows you to rewrap it. Yea. Did you not want that? I've been waiting for this one for a long time. And you can add whatever text you need. Right. I thought that was a huge improvement. OK.

There's a new dimension command. If you're in 2016, you've already found it. You've already been using it. And it's your favorite. Right.

How many of you still type in DIM from the old days? To get the old dimension command? Well, that one's gone now. And now you're going to get this one. All right. So the key in for this is DIM. So they're going to force you into the new world. All right.

But the new dimension command actually looks at what you hover on. So if I come in and I hover on a circle, it's going to give me a diameter. If I hover on a line, it will give me linear. So a parallel line will give me-- if I get that to hover. I didn't mean to catch that. See, there's that one.

I get an aligned if it's an angled line. If it's a straight line, you're going to get the straight line. And whichever one you pick when you finally select it, that's where you drag your dimension out. All right. Now there's a couple of other really neat things that you can do with this.

If you're using this new command. And let's say I want to split this 2.0 dimension into two. If I hover here and I select this, when I come up here and I select on this dimension-- come on. Oop, I must have fat fingered it. Come on. Find it. Oh, come on. Why aren't you giving me the break?

Yeah. But I don't want to you use-- oh, but you know why? Because I don't have my dynamic input turned on. Who uses dynamic input? Yeah. This one is easier to see if you use this.

So I select it and I come up. And now I select this. And there's a new breakup option. If I do the breakup and I select this dimension, it'll actually break this dimension. It's supposed to break up. There we go. And it'll break it into two. Isn't that a great option?

So now you don't have to trim and then dimension. Right. So that saved me a couple steps. And if you're doing the dimension command and you're on a circle and you select that, you'll see you have an option to change to radius right at that point so you don't have to even really have those other commands.

So now the only command you really need to use is DIM, unless you're dimensioning between things. Yes?

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE].

PRESENTER: You want the length of the arc?

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] the link from this point to this but that line happens to be an arc.

PRESENTER: Right. The question was how do you dimension the length of an arc? And in AutoCAD it's not a simple process. Right. Any other civil people out there?

So I would be happy to show you the steps you have to go through to do that. But I have to set up a specific dimension style in order to do that. So send me an email after the fact, and if anybody else wants that too, and I can send you the step-by-steps to do that, show you what you need to set up. Because you have to set up a specific style to get that to work. OK. OK. All right.

This is another oldie but I want to make sure everybody knows about it. You edit your text. And you want this to be a typical dimension. Right. And you don't want it to stay up on that line. You want to go down below.

I'm actually going-- am I in the right file here? Let's see. Yes I am. OK. Because I have a style in here that I want to use.

How do I get TYP to go below the line? Because if I hit Enter, it does that. Right. Somebody knew it. What do you do? Backslash, capital X. Right.

And that will actually send it below the line. Now if you do this a lot, like you maybe have-- well, I'm not saying you should do this a lot. But what if you have a not to scale dimension because you're in a hurry. Right. But then you always go back and fix it. Yeah, right. I know you don't.

If I have a dimension that I want to do this on, what I do is I create a style so the users can do this easily. You select the dimension, right click, and if you go to Style, you could have a Typical Dimension or a Not to Scale Dimension. And it'll automatically put it on there for you. All right.

So it's important that you make life easier because otherwise your users don't do what they're supposed to do. Right. So how I did that is if you look at the dimensions styles for typical, all I did was underneath of-- which prime? There it is. As a suffix or a prefix, whichever one you want it to use, I put the backslash X with the TYP.

And then that will force that to be below any true number that is in my dimension. All right. Now if you edit your dimension so that it's no longer true, first of all, I'll slap your hand. Right. Now how do you restore it?

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE].

PRESENTER: Excellent. You come in here, highlight that number, and you do less than and greater than. Now, this I've had trouble with this. Yeah, I have had trouble with this before. I end up now in 16, I have to come over here and do it in my override right here.

I'm going to have to report that one. Because they don't like that. Right. I don't like having to do it from Properties. And something about MTEXT editor's not letting me put that back in. OK. We already talked about split dimensions. OK.

Quick Edit MLEADERS. Everybody knows that if you select a multileader, you can remove the leader. Right. All right. That's a given. I'm assuming that's not a secret.

Now the secret is, how can I quickly come in and just delete one line without using Remove Leader? Because this way is quicker. Who was in my Jeopardy class? What's your favorite key in on AutoCAD?

AUDIENCE: Control.

PRESENTER: Control. So if I come in, did you know that if you hold the Control key down and you select the leader line, you can just hit Delete? Isn't that nice? And another thing you can do-- so once you find that out, you start trying things out. Well, what if I zoom in here and I use the Control key and I pick just the arrowhead? Hmm. What could I do with that? So if I want to change the arrowhead, I'm going to turn on Quick Properties. And let's change it to Open, Closed Blank. They're all changing. I can change the size. Oops.

Isn't that cool? No? I thought it was cool. So I'm sorry. OK. Maybe I'm weird. But I thought that was cool.

You can also come in, select the line, and using Quick Properties, you can change it from one type to another. None. Now that splat does not look like a spline. So I'm not sure what's happening with that spline. But I may have to modify this a little bit. That is not a spline.

Let's try this one. I'll do it over here. There we go. Now let's change that to spline. There, that's how it's supposed to work. I'm not sure why that one's not working. All right.

So you can change any part of the multileader. So now you can have a multileader with some straight lines and some spline lines. Because you can't define it that way as a style, can you? Nope. All right. OK.

The Forgotten Dimension Command. Everybody knows that if you do DIM Aligned, right, and I would snap here and here, I'm going to get a crooked dimension. Because don't DIM Aligned aligns to your snap points. That's not what I want to do.

So there is a key-in only command called DIM Rotated that the only way to find it is if you key it in. So if I type in DIM Rotated, all right, specify the angle of the dimension line. Let's just angle it with that. Now if I snap to those points, it stays parallel.

AUDIENCE: Ahh.

PRESENTER: Now you're a good draftsman. Right. We got these rule that you still have to follow. Some of you are old enough to have done drafting by hand. Right. Remember those old days when we used those archaic things like pencils and pens? All right.

I had a student once go, draw by hand? What do you mean draw by hand?

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] the dimensions this time will reflect those two points that you did this last time. So that you dragging up the dimension, bring your cursor back to the first line, it's [INAUDIBLE] a line.

PRESENTER: The new one? This one? All right. You get a prize if this works. Because that's a tip I didn't know. So you go from here to here.

AUDIENCE: Right. Now, bring your cursor-- keep going down like you're going to drag it out. Go down. Yeah. Keep going down.

PRESENTER: Oh, see the angle you mean?

AUDIENCE: All the way, keep going.

PRESENTER: Keep going to where?

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE].

PRESENTER: I'm trying.

AUDIENCE: Oh, it's going straight up and down.

PRESENTER: Um-- [CREAK]

[LAUGHTER]

That's OK. You almost got a prize. That would be cool if I can hover here though and it would align. Right. Now, I did notice there is an angle. But that's a text angle. So I don't think I can do that. But that was a good idea.

Go to the [? Aug-U ?] website and do a wish list. Because I think that's a great idea. I'll give you a small prize if you come up. All right.

Yes, anybody who gives me tips that I don't know. Because I can't find all these. You guys have to help me. OK. Now, I already did number 14. How would you reset all of your dimensions to be true?

If somebody's overwritten them, you do the less than, greater than. Right. So how would you do that globally? Just select all your dimensions and use Properties. Right. OK. OK.

Here I just have my regular dimensions from a drawing that I did years and years ago. How many of you are using parametric? Really? None of you?

AUDIENCE: Yeah, me.

PRESENTER: All right. There's one. Yea. Star pupils. OK.

If you've got an old drawing and you want to now make it parametric, all right, but it's already got the dimensions already on it. There is a button right here that allows you to convert the old dimensions to a parametric dimension. Now, it doesn't initially look like it's going to do what you want. Because it does that. All right.

The reason it does that is because D1 is the value that's the parameter name. Right. If you look at this variable right here, Constraint Name Format. What you need to do is change this variable so that it doesn't give you the expression but it gives you the value. All right. So if I come in here and I select this and I go to Properties, it's annotational. All right.

It does have to be annotational as well, just so you know. But I think they all come up that way now by default. Prior to 2015/2016, I used to always have to come in here and change this to annotational All right. Because it would turn into like a grayish.

It'll look like this initially. So be sure you come in here and change this to annotational. And then if you type in that constraint name format. And I change it to a 1. Then it'll actually look like a real dimension when it prints but it's still parametric. All right. All right.

This one, there's a couple answers for. Depends on what version you're in. How do I get my dimensions to size themselves in my view ports? What's the best answer?

Annotation scale. Right. How many of you are using annotation scale? That's getting better. It's getting better. Most people are still not liking it.

But it's a learning curve. Try again. If you don't use annotational dimensions, then what you want to do is you want to set your DIM scale to 0. If you set your DIM scale to 0 and you dimension in your view port AutoCAD will automatically size your dimensions anyway. OK. Trust me, it works. OK.

I keep getting this question so I added it. All right. Sometimes you think people know things and you find out that they don't. Here I want to do in angular dimension. And if I select my two lines, I get everything less than 180. Right. How do you get more than 180?

I get this question at least two or three times a year. You run the command differently. All right. If you look, it asks you can hit Enter to specify the vertex. Read that thing called your command line. Right.

If I hit Enter, I can now specify the vertex here. And I can go to here and here. And I can get any angle that I want. See? It's hidden. People don't even know that. So good.

There were a few of you that hadn't discovered that. All right. Oops. Not Control P. You know what, I better close some of these. I'm going to right click. Here's another good one.

I'll do right click up here. Close all other drawings. And we'll just say No. I wish there was a close all and don't make me say no.

There we go. All right. Not that it would crash on me but-- OK.

I have a polyline. How do I get rid of that middle segment without exploding? All right. If I hold the Control key down, our favorite key in AutoCAD, and you select this, it selects it as a sub-object. Now, this command was initially intended for 3D. So you could select sub-objects in 3D. But nobody said it wouldn't work in 2D.

So if you select this. And let me turn off my Quick Properties here. And you just hit the Delete key, how many of you would still be exploding? Right. And here's the cool part. These stay polylines.

AUDIENCE: Ahh.

PRESENTER: Right? It's even better. Explode is not the answer for everything. It should not be your first solution. Ah, it doesn't work, explode it. Right.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE].

PRESENTER: Pardon?

AUDIENCE: Does that still stay at one [INAUDIBLE] line, you do you select multiple?

PRESENTER: You could select multiple.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE].

PRESENTER: Yeah, they're two separate. Yes. If I Control, Delete. Yeah, this is a polyline and that's a polyline. They're not connected. But they stayed as polylines, whereas had you exploded it, they would all be they would all be lines. Because then you exploded it to individual lines and delete one of the lines. All right.

The Offset Command. Now I'll confess, the reason I looked for this one and figured it out and was so happy when they finally did it was because I also teach MicroStation. This was one of our missing commands in AutoCAD that we needed for a long time.

In the Offset Command, you can go through a point. You have a layer option. All right. So I'm going to go ahead and set my distance to 12 inches. And then I want to go ahead-- actually, let me change the layer first. L for layer.

I have the choice of current or source. All right. So my current layer is green and dashed. All right. Source means it's going to take the original element or object that I pick and it's going to let me offset that. All right.

So there's two options in here that are buried in the middle of the command that a lot of people don't discover. And it's hard to do it if you do it manually. I'm going to show you to put it on a button.

In the handout, I show you how to put it in a button. But if I do offset and I go ahead and pick Enter and then I select my line, here's multiple. You've got to remember to pick M. All right.

What did I do? Did I type the wrong thing? All right. We're going to do enter for 12, select my first line, and then I'm going to do M for multiple. Why is my M not showing up? There it is. All right.

And now I can continue to do multiple offsets just by clicking whichever direction you want to go. All right. Now, it's easy to lose that when you're working through the command because you're not reading your command line. Right. The other one is to offset the current.

So, again, if we do Offset. Sorry, I'm a keyboard person. I'm going to assume you know where the Offset Command is. I'll still do the 12. But I want the layer to be changed to be current. All right. So now when I select this, it goes to my current layer. Right.

I used to do Utilities. Believe me, every utility line in your neighborhood runs along the property line. But I don't want it on the same layer. And I don't want it the same color. Right. Yea. OK, maybe it was just me.

But that was because I used to always have to offset and then I'd have to move it to where I wanted it. All right. Now if you put this on a button, it's much easier. So I have a couple buttons here. All right.

Offset Current, Offset Multiple, I show you in the handout what to put on the button. So now if I go ahead and I do offset multiple, it just does it. All right. I'll just do the same distance, pick my line. And remember, I'm set still to layer as current. All right. And you can also have one that does layer to current or layer to multiple, Offset Multiple. OK.

You might also want one that says Offset Source, depending on how to use this. Is anybody in pre-2009? I hope not, otherwise my tip would be upgrade.

[LAUGHTER]

But just in case you are, I also put the old way. Because you had to change how you did those buttons along the way. So I still put the old key-ins for the buttons if anybody happens to be in that old version. All right.

So now we've got on-the-fly base points. All right. This one, if I go ahead and I select this, I'm actually going to go to Insert so I can show it to you first. So I'm going to insert my block, a real complex drawing here, right. When I bring in my drawing and I want to change the insertion point on the fly, this is a dynamic block. And I'll show you how I did this. If I'll hit the Control key, I have alternative insertion points in my block that I can use.

So I can place it any way that I want. All right. Now there's a oops in 2016, in 2015, where if you select the block, right click, and do Add Selected, which is how I place most of my blocks anymore. I just pick the block that's already there, right click, Add Selected, and start inserting more. It doesn't work.

I've logged it. Please go and vote for it to get fixed. Right. So you do have to be in the Insert Command in order for that to work, not the Add Selected Command. All right. Now how I did that was in the block itself, you have to define point parameters. You don't have to do any actions. All you have to do is put a point parameter where you want your alternative insertion points to be. And then every time you hit the Control key, it cycles between them. All right.

So you're just sitting there going Control, Control, Control, Control until you get to the insertion point that you want and you place it.

AUDIENCE: Does that work if have actions on them?

PRESENTER: It should work if you have actions on them too, yes. Yes. The question was, does it work if you have an action assigned to the point? Yes it will. But be careful when you're inserting because if your origin point and your point parameter are in the same place, I've had that cause a problem. But-- All right.

Now, another option is this. If you have a once-off insertion point that you need, how do you do that? How do you define your base point on the fly?

What's that thing you're supposed to be reading?

AUDIENCE: Command line.

PRESENTER: Look at your command line. You have a base point option. If you just type in B and you say I need it to be offset from here like just a little bit, that is now your insertion point before you place it. So you're in the insert command and you change it on a fly. Right. Just a one off. OK.

If you're afraid of dynamic blocks. But dynamic box are not hard. Start simple. OK.

This is one that I learned this year. And you won't believe how long we've been able to do this. I was so disappointed. OK. I've got this arrow here. I'm going to copy it to the clipboard. Right.

So that when you paste it, it's exactly what I had when I copied it in the clipboard. Now first of all, I would change one thing. Select your objects. And then do Control Shift C. What does that give me? I can specify the base point that I want to pick it up from.

So I'm going to pick it up from here. That's not the tip yet. All right. So that now when I paste it, that's how I have a hold of it. So first of all instead of doing Control C, do Control Shift C. All right. Now the tip that I learned is an undocumented my command line is lying to me. There's more stuff I can do than this. All right.

If I just type in R 90, I can paste my clipboard it any angle I want. It works as far back as I could go. All right. Yes, it works in 3D. Question is, does it work in 3D? Yes, it does work in 3D. Isn't that awesome?

So just R and give it an angle.

AUDIENCE: How about scale?

PRESENTER: I didn't try scale. I don't think scale. I think I did try it actually. It works.

AUDIENCE: Ahh.

PRESENTER: See, your command lines-- you get a prize. See, your command line is lying to you. There's more there than they're telling you. All right. That was one of the ones I learned this year and I was like, please don't tell me I could have done that all these years. Because how many times have you pasted and rotated? A lot. All right. OK.

Quicker Join. There's a couple different ways you can do this. I've got all these lines. They're either overlapped or separated. Right. I did the separated because you can see that better. But they could also overlap.

We've all run into the drawing. Let's see, do and I not have it in this? That has those dash, dash, dash, dash, dash, dash, dash somebody-- poor CAD operator who didn't do this right. I don't have this file in here. But you've got overlapping segments or segments that are connected together and it's like 500 objects rather than 1. All right.

Well, the new way to do it is to say Join. Right. If you pick Join and you select everything, it'll join them all together. It should have. Maybe I have that too big. Oh, wonderful.

Because I do have a fuzz factor for the old way. One of things Join will not do though is it will not join things around a corner. It'll only join things that are adjacent to each other. So you'd have to do each one in its shape independently.

So how would you do it the old way if you wanted this entire shape to be joined? P Edit, right. And you would select-- I'm just going to say M for multiple and select everything. Oops, missed one. Two. All right.

Now what you want to do is there's a fuzz factor. All right. If you picked join, here's your fuzz factor. So that's why I gave you the dimensions. My fuzz factor has to be bigger than 0.5. If I made 0.3, it would only closed the 1 gap. If I do 0.6 and then I say Join-- come on.

And we'll go ahead and hit Enter. And it closed. Oh, why? Don't know why it didn't close that one. It's the only 0.5. But it will actually come in and close all of those into a single polyline because that one, the old P Edit Join while still go around corners. All right.

The reason my other two didn't is because I probably fat fingered it in the wrong order on the command line. OK. Rotating the world. I only put this one in here because of 2016. Hopefully everybody knows you have a UCS and you can rotate your world as you're working. Right.

So when you're rotating your world, whether you're in 2D or 3D, you can come in and you can rotate by placing it by selecting an object. The problem is they turned off this panel by default. So secret number one, when you first get in the new version of AutoCAD, whatever it is, go check your ribbon out and look for stuff they turned off by default. Because I think they assume you don't use it.

If you right click, Show Panels, it's not called UCS, it's called Coordinates. It's UCS. All right. So there's all your commands that you can't find in the ribbon. And then of course you've got this one here, where you could do rotate by object. All right. And you just select the object and it rotates your cursor to match that object.

So now when you're drawing your lines, you don't have to have all those different polar angles to find. Because all it really did-- I don't know if you can see it-- is it rotated my cursor. Right. Now, I didn't know this until I was a trainer. And I would be teaching this command.

And we would run this command. And the first thing everybody would do-- it was almost in unison. The whole room would just go gunk. Right. And they start looking at their screen like this. Well, OK, so if you've ever had a sore neck while you're working, you need to have it follow you so you can work straight. Because we like things to be straight. OK.

There's no straight road in this world, I'm telling you. UCS follow used to be a bad thing because it would be a performance hit. All right. Not the case anymore, at least not I haven't run into a being any kind of a hit on my performance. So if I change this. And now I say rotate by object by using that button.

And I pick one of these lines. It will do a Zoom Extents. And then you can zoom in and it rotated. All right. Now, one of the tricks that-- be honest with you, I can't get it to work in 2016. But when you do the UCS follow and it does a zoom, it actually does the previous zoom. So we're going to try it again.

But it doesn't work all the time. I'll do a Zoom to Objects and just select some stuff. So it zooms to the object. Then when I come in-- so I did this like zoom factor right before, now if I pick an align, now it works.

Yea, for once it works when I'm demonstrating. So if you don't like that UCS follow going all the way out to Zoom Extents, what it really looks for is your previous zoom. So if you built a button that did a zoom objects and you selected your area of your view first and then did that and then run this UCS object, it won't go all the way out in your drawing and come back in. It will just rotate what you're looking in your view.

Because you know when you do a zoom, you have an option in here, right, to specify objects. So just select whatever you want to select. You have to be careful, you might have some long ones that go all the way out. But it will control your Zoom factor. Then run the UCS follow and it does what you want. Because that's a question everybody always asks is, how do you keep UCS follow from zooming extents? All right.

I'll do this one. It's kind of an oldie one. There's still an old command called Change. All right, Change used to be what we would do for Properties back in the old days. Anybody old enough in here to remember change? Couple of you? All right.