Making the AutoCAD Web App Work for You

MICHAEL NAUMAN: Hello, everyone. Welcome to Autodesk University 2021. This session is called Making AutoCAD web Work for You. My name is Michael Nauman. Let's get started.

The agenda for this session is an introduction about me, who I am, what I do, why I'm giving this talk. We're going to take a look at why web. Why did Autodesk put AutoCAD in a browser? What's that all about?

And then to help answer those questions, I'm going to give you a demo. I'm going to show everyone the File Manager and our Editor, an overview on both of those. We're going to look at the storage options that we've added.

And then we're going to take a deeper dive into looking at how web and desktop work together. I don't consider them either or, I consider them a value add. And we'll get into that.

And then we're going to circle back on the conclusion on why web. Hopefully, we answered some of those questions. I'm sure you probably have why web questions of your own.

And then contact information. I want to make sure everyone on this call has a-- or the session, knows how to get in touch with us. The web team likes talking to people. We like feedback, good and bad.

And then after this session, there's going to be a lot of Q&A. I will be there along with other members of the web team to answer your questions.

A little bit about me. Like I said, my name is Michael Nauman. I'm the Quality Assurance Lead for AutoCAD web. I've been on the AutoCAD testing team for almost 24 years. The last 10 were on the web team.

But before that, I worked on desktop, I've worked on Mac a little and even a little bit less on mobile. But I'm familiar with all of them. And then prior to Autodesk, I worked for-- I worked for 10 years as an AutoCAD user doing heavy construction, wastewater treatment was were I worked. And then GIS, which is Geographic Information Systems. I did a couple of years doing that as a user.

Along the way, I got my bachelor's in geography. Of course, specializing in the course GIS and remote sensing. The two topics are near and dear to my heart. But that's for another day. Back when I was a user, my employer at the time, sent me to the 1997 Ezra User Conference, where on a whim, I entered the AutoLISP contest. And I won.

In the picture at the top right-- let me move this out of the way. That's me a long time ago. Clearly, I don't have a mustache anymore, but that was the week after that conference. And it was quite the event. We can talk about that later.

This is the second Autodesk University I've participated in, but the first as a-- doing a presentation. And then these are two pictures of me and my son. Every chance we get we, go outside and we like to do fun things. Summer, winter, bikes, snowboarding, all that kind of stuff.

So why web? This is a question that has been asked many times to me and to others. I ask myself, why am I doing this? When you have AutoCAD desktop and you have a very powerful computer and you have multiple monitors and it's highly configured, you're going to look at web, and you're going to go, what's the point? Why? Why did what did Autodesk do this?

It's a valid point. If I had desktop right in front of me and I had it all dialed in like I did when I was a user, I'd look at web and go, no. It's like, there's not enough there there. But we'll talk about that and why that's intentional.

Web has limited tools. Web will never have the same exact tools that desktop does. That's not what web is for. There's limitations, performance. Web suffers from the internet. We're heavily dependent on the internet as well as browser technology.

We'll see some of that today. They'll be opening some files and you'll see it for yourself. And you probably-- if you've used web before, you know. Sometimes it can be a little temperamental trying to load files. It just internet and browser.

But then there's also visual fidelity. There's capability that you have on a desktop with video cards and GPUs that you don't get in the browser. So things like 3D visual styles or like font support, that's another one.

So there are limitations. We've dealt with most of the easy ones. And so the problems we're dealing with now are hard and complicated. But we're working on it. There's still a lot of progress going on.

And then I've been on this team a while, and I started back when AutoCAD WS was the browser version of AutoCAD. And then it changed to AutoCAD 360. And now, we're on AutoCAD web. We know we upset some customers with WS and AutoCAD 360.

The technology was OK, at best. WS had some success, but not nothing like where AutoCAD web is right now. And so if you're still mad at what we did years ago with WS and AutoCAD 360, we had valid reasons for what we did. But it still was a very unfortunate situation.

And if you're still mad at us, that's OK. Hopefully, this session will make you less mad. But I totally understand because I was there and I know how it went. So bottom line, this session isn't about me trying to sell you use web instead of desktop.

I don't see there being-- it's not an either or. Like I said, it's a value-- it's a yes and. They're very complementary in the right situation. Both work good in the right place, right time. And we're going to look at that.

So the goal of this is to give everyone on this session a better understanding of what web can and cannot do, how it works with desktop and interoperability. And then hopefully, you get some insights and maybe you can see where it could add value to your workflows or your projects.

So then let's go to the demo. And-- all right, let's look at the demo. I have right here on the left side of the screen, the default browser, Edge using Windows 10. There's nothing special about my browser.

But it is Edge, I'm not using Chrome. And so this is our new landing page. You can see we updated it a little bit. It looks a lot better than it did before. And I'm going to go ahead and log in.

I've already done the multifactor authentication, so that's all taken care of. If it's your first time logging in, you'll have to do that. Let me log in. Click the Next button. So I'm not going to put in my password. There we go.

So it's pretty simple once it knows who I am on this machine. If I went to a different machine or I cleaned out this one, I would have to go through all that again. But this one's already set up. Do you notice this is our File Manager? It's a basic file navigation sort of an interface.

Right now, we're looking at AutoCAD web and mobile. This is the storage you get when you make a new account. You get this for free. This is the one we've been using all along. And basic stuff, like, you can upload drawings, you can make folders, you can make new drawings. We're going to look at that in a second.

And then you can also add different storage providers. I've got mine pre-configured to use OneDrive. But let's take a look at this. You have access to Autodesk Docs, Autodesk Drive, Box, Dropbox, Google Drive and OneDrive.

The setting up any of these four is pretty straightforward. Yeah, I'll just show you a Google Drive. Each one's a little different just to how their interface is. But it's all basically, you have to go to their website, log in is your account for Google Drive or Box or Dropbox. And then that's when the two know, there's like, OK, we can talk to each other now.

So it's pretty simple. But each one is a little slightly different. Nothing too complicated. So let's make a new drawing. Let's get to the good stuff. So this is our new Create Drawing dialogue. You notice we have drawing templates down here. This is something users-- customers asked for, so we added it.

You notice there's six of them in here. If I click Add Drawing Templates, we open up the Manage Support Files. I can upload my own. So if you have your own custom template files, you can put them here.

You can also get rid of the ones you don't want. Like I'm going to get rid of that one. No, I actually want to keep it. But you could do that. So if you had a bunch in here you weren't using it anymore, you could get rid of them.

Same thing with hash patterns. I don't have any loaded, but you could do the same thing here. And then plot styles. This was another huge request where you can see I have both CTB and STB. AutoCAD web supports both, which it should and it does, which is fantastic.

So let's close out. And then I'm going to give the drawing a name of AU. Not for Autodesk University, but for gold. It's the symbol on the periodic table. Nerd humor. So let's click the Create button.

And so we're going to make a new gold drawing-- an Au drawing. This is going to take a second. The first drawing load takes a bit. There's some setup that has to go on. And you can see, down where the command line is, you can see that there's things happening. So we know it's working.

And here we go. Yeah, well, I was talking about performance earlier. This is what I meant. It's working, but it's-- there we go. There we go. Properties. So this is the editor. This is where you-- it's just like AutoCAD.

You edit your drawings, you modify them, change them, all that standard stuff. You noticed up here at the top, this is how you know where you're drawing is, you know where you are. It's a navigation tool.

And then on the side here, these are our palettes. This is the object properties. This is no different than Properties in AutoCAD. Right now, these properties would apply to a new object I create. But if I selected something, those properties would appear here, same with Multi Select.

Layers, you can go in, you can make new layers. Basic functionality here. Yeah, there we go. You can change the name, of course. You can lock it, you can turn on and off. You can change the color. I'll set that to two, which is yellow. And you can see it turn yellow.

Blocks, we're going to look at blocks a little bit later and more deeper, especially how blocs work between desktop and web. XREFs, we're going to look at those too. Traces, we're not going to look at. Traces are a new feature-- relatively new feature and they deserve a session on their own. So if you're interested, take a look but I'm not going to go into it.

And down here at the bottom, we have three tool palettes, Draw, Annotate, Modify. Basic standard AutoCAD 2D drafting. Functionality Copy, Move, Rotate, Rectangle, Circles, Lines, Arcs, MTEXT, Leaders, Rev Clouds, those sorts of things. They're all in here.

And if you notice, as I'm hovering over the tools, you can see the command line is actually echoing the same command. So if I hit Enter-- nope, it didn't work. Yeah, there did. OK, it did work.

I don't want to do that, so I'm going to cancel it. That's pretty cool. Come on, cancel. So one thing I want to show everyone is that the new command line-- not the new command line, but some of the new enhancements is you can expand it up. And you can actually scroll through your command history and see what you've been doing.

If you right click, you can copy all of it, paste it into a text file, email, whatever. And you can also clear it. It's really handy at times. Down here, Model Layout, Layout 1, Layout 2. You can add more layouts, standard layout tabs just like AutoCAD.

And then over here, some drafting settings. Like you can, oh, snaps. oh, I always like picking my node. Pick your node. OTRACK, ORTHO, the setting you can turn these on and off. I like to keep them all on. And then across the top, you can see there there's this button here that says top.

Well, this is a view control. You can see top, bottom, left, right, isometric. One thing I didn't mention earlier is that when you're looking at the canvas here-- the editor, that has a grid. And that grid looks real familiar because this is AutoCAD right here. UCS icon, same thing. Here's your coordinates.

If I change to isometric, it's going to through the view command and it's actually going to do it. You can see that my cursor updated correctly. The USC icon looks right. This looks to me like AutoCAD, because it is. And so it's pretty cool stuff.

So let me switch back to top. And then we have Undo, Redo, of course. Standard tools. Zoom Extents, Zoom Window. There's this Layer drop down, which is really handy. One thing I didn't show is that these palettes, you can collapse them to maximize your drawing area. And this dropdown's really handy if you just want to change the layers.

You don't have to re-expand-- you don't have to click layers expand and go in there and a bunch of clicks. It's just click, click, right there. But I'm going to pop that out. And you can see that Layer 1's now the current layer because I changed it here.

Then a Save button, of course. We can also do Save As. You can only save to the latest AutoCAD format. You cannot save to previous AutoCAD formats. Web doesn't allow that.

We have the ability to plot and we only have the ability to plot the PDF. It's very basic. If you're in the Model space-- the Model tab, you're going to plot the or plot the display and scale to fit. You can change the CTB files.

And you see the STB's grayed out. So I can't select that, but I can select this one, which is awesome. Another access point to the Manage Support Files is right here too. Real handy. I'm going to cancel-- I'm not going to plot it.

What happens here is to add the plot system to AutoCAD web would make the application so much more bigger that it would-- performance of loading, like trying to actually get it up and running inside the browser to get to the File Manager would take much longer.

And there's no real need to have a lot of that plotting code that's kind of desktop centric in a browser where we don't need a lot of that stuff. You don't need to get a Windows system driver. So it's really basic. So what we did is actually really cool.

When you click Plot the PDF, it takes all the drawing and XREFs and all the information, sends it to AutoCAD I/O. AutoCAD I/O actually does the plot command and generates the PDF. And then sends it back here.

So if I were to do this-- if I were to plot right now, I'd get back at blank PDF. Here, I'm going to cancel this. A notification would appear in the top right of the editor and would say, generating your PDF. And then when AutoCAD I/O is finished, it sends it back. And that notification updates with a link that says, OK, click the link and you can download it. Really, really cool technology.

Settings, this is the Settings dialog. Some basic settings. Pick Your Node. It's always there. But one thing I want to point out is Selection Settings. We just updated this recently-- the last two months, I believe. The web standard, if you look the little information window here, is that AutoCAD web, when you select, its click and drag, which is web behavior-- it's browser behavior.

But if you're a desktop user, you're going to want to go click, click. And so we got feedback from customers saying, hey, this is wrong. How come it doesn't work like desktop? Well, now you can go either way. So we added that for you. I'm going to keep it-- [COUGHS] excuse me-- on web.

And Tracking, Units. Oh, let me show you Units. So Units, same sort of thing as desktop. All familiar. Nothing different. Same thing with Decimal Degrees, Radians, Gradians, very familiar. Same with Precision, either 0 to 8. So let's close that.

And then help. I want to point out that there's a ways to get in touch with the AutoCAD team. There's this Provide Feedback. This is a quick survey. This is a link to the AutoCAD web forum. The public user forum. And then this is an-- it's a online form for that goes specifically to product support.

And ultimately, all three of these come back to me because I'm the Quality Assurance Lead for web. So any one of these, the web team will get the information. And we do read them. We do look at them. We love talking to customers. We'll talk more about that later.

And then your profile, Sign Out. Account Details, that takes you to the accounts.autodesk.com where you can look at all your entitlements and your software and all that. The Open in Desktop button here, we're going to take a good look at that. That's really fantastic technology, along with Share. And Share's a simple, yet powerful tool too as well.

So let's get out of this. And I don't want to save because it's a blank drawing. All right, let's take a look at OneDrive, desktop and web. I'm going to turn off my camera because it really impacts my performance. And this is because my computer is ancient and it has an old video card. It's not anything like probably anybody on this call has.

So this computer works fine when I'm not recording the screen and I don't have my camera on. But I'm going to turn off my camera right now just to make it easier on my poor old computer. So here we are back in web and mobile. We looked at this before.

Let's look at OneDrive. So like I said, I already pre-configured this. And if you notice-- let me hide this. If you notice, I've clicked OneDrive. Here's my files that are shared with me. So if you have a list of both it's going to get those.

But let's look at just the regular files. And you notice, it's got my folders in here. And then if I go to OverDrive and I look at it in the browser at the same account, you notice the list of files is the same.

I already went in and configured it and authentication, so it's already set up to work for me. Like I said before, it's pretty simple and straightforward. And then I have it set up to sync to my desktop right here. You can see my OneDrive is sinking to my desktop and I have my OneDrive folder.

So I have a list of files locally, in the cloud on OneDrive and as well as in AutoCAD web are the same. Single point of truth. We're not making multiple copies in web versus desktop. We're trying to keep the file clutter to a minimum.

I'm going to go into my Au folder. I'm going to click Civil. This is the sheet set sample that was shipped with AutoCAD, I believe it was 2004. Almost 20 years ago. A familiar set of files, most people would probably recognize them. They've been around.

And so I'm going to click this Existing Conditions Plan and I'm going to open it up. And you can see the command lines doing its thing. AutoCAD web is loading. And we wanted-- there's two XREFs with this drawing-- attached to this drawing so let's take a look at how those load. Let's click the XREF tab.

And you notice there's these spinning wheels. So the parent drawing opens. It's like, oh, there's a XREF. AutoCAD web has to go like that. And if there's a nested XREF, AutoCAD web has to go get that one. So it's a little slower than desktop.

But you can see they're just loaded. The file data is all here. I'm going to do a Zoom Window just to get a better look at it. There we go. The file looks good. So XREF's are there. If there's more complicated tree structure, it all works.

If the XREF folder is in the same storage provider as the host drawing, it should resolve the path right here. All these files are in the same folder, but they don't have to be. One thing we don't support is a host drawing on one provider, like OneDrive and your XREFs in Google Drive. That doesn't work and that's by design.

So if you have a tree structure like a typical project where you have architecture or mechanical drawings or pin IDs and your XREF's are in a separate folder, that'll all work. Work just fine. So let's look at Blocks real quick. I mentioned that before.

There's Recent Blocks. There is the Blocks in this drawing. You can see without the camera on that it generates pretty quickly. The Recents and then Favorites. You can connect these to be the same Blocks in desktop and web. And we're going to look at that in a little bit when I go back to desktop.

So let's look at Share. Share's a relatively new feature last year. It's one of my most favorites. And so what happens is you click the Share button and it brings up this dialogue and you have two options. View Only and Edit and Save Copy. View Only, clearly, is viewing.

If you send someone to link they can open the file, the XREFs will go with it. And they can't save, they can't make PDFs. But they can view, they can change layouts, they can zoom in, zoom out. Viewing functionality.

Edit and Save a Copy, whoever clicks that link is going to open up that file and they can make a copy of it. They can save it, they can make a PDF. So now, you have two versions of your file. You got to be careful with that. You don't want to have multiple copies all over the place.

But very handy if you want to get somebody, here, take it and do your thing with it. I'm going to leave it on View Only and I'm going to click Copy Link. So now the link's copied to my clipboard. I'm going to close it.

And imagine I have an email or Slack or Microsoft Teams or some other website. I have that link, I can post that anywhere. And anyone who clicks it can actually view it. So imagine I give it to somebody and I'm in a another office across the street, different part of the country, other side of the Earth, doesn't matter.

I give them that link and they paste it in their browser or they just click it. And you notice, AutoCAD web starts. I'm already logged in. I already am-- the authentication already taken care of. Otherwise, you'd be prompted to do that.

But you notice, that was pretty quick. And I'm going to expand it a little bit. XREF's after loading up. Just like in the other file, you can see it spinning. Because I stretched the canvas so it looks a little funny but it'll fix it-- there we go.

And you notice, that drawing's there. So like I said, you can't plot. Its view only. There's no Save button. But this is the same file. And so that's super handy, really easy. All you got to do is click it. If you're logged in, it loads that quick. Awesome, awesome feature. I love it.

So now, let's look at Open in Desktop. Another one of my favorites. If you're in, say, PowerPoint and you're using the browser version, Open in Desktop is real similar. If you want to-- the browser version isn't cutting it for you, you have AutoCAD installed on your desktop.

And I have AutoCAD 2022 installed. Same version everyone else has out there, nothing special. If I click Open in Desktop, which I'm going to, it's going to open this drawing with the XREFS, everything else in AutoCAD desktop.

And you notice, it's saving changes if there is, because I resized the display-- the zoom factor-- it's got to save it. But now it's opening. Really handy. And you can see, same warning. The browser's telling you, hey, I'm not sure you want to do this.

For demo purposes, I have not checked this. But if I wasn't doing demos, I would always-- I would not want to see this. Like, yes, I want you to do this. So I'm going to click Open. And now wait a second.

And you can see Windows is doing something. Here comes AutoCAD 2022. There's no smoke and mirrors here. This is how it works. Try it out for yourselves. And you can see everything's loading up.

This is standard AutoCAD start. I got to log in. I've already done that so I don't have to do that. It's just going to go straight to opening the file. And give it a second. There we go. Now it's going to open the drawing.

This is expected. I'm going to ignore it. Here comes the block palette. XREF's are there. Let's take a look. Let's take a look. There we go. Same two XREFs are loaded up, just like you would expect it to be. Perfect. That's awesome.

So now, if I were to edit this file-- I'm just going to draw a circle. And imagine you've changed the road, you had a change order or something. You've got to move the street, whatever. I'm going to draw a circle to make a change and I'm going to save the file.

And it saved. But now the two files are different. There's this version here in my desktop app-- AutoCAD desktop. And there's no circle in this one. And that's not necessarily a good thing. But if I go back to web and I say, continue, there's a new version of the file because I changed it in desktop. The two are talking to each other.

And so if I click Open in Latest Version-- or Open Latest Version, it's going to go get that file that was just edited. It's going to load it back up into AutoCAD web. And this right here is why I was hitting performance issues with the camera on. I don't know why. We're going to have to research that.

But you can see the command lines doing its thing. There we go. XREF's are loading. And there's my circle that I just drew. Let me get this out of the way. There's my circle. And if I click XREFs, you can see that they're still loading. Circle's there. Circle's there. Circle's there. Files are back in sync.

That dialogue may not show up immediately. It may take a couple of seconds. Because AutoCAD webs' checking that file to see if there's been any edits. And you don't want to check every second. You want to check some bigger amount of time, but not too long. You don't want too much editing going on.

But that dialogue does show up, it does get the files back in sync. Let me move that. And then let's take a look at the block palette. If you notice, I have-- in AutoCAD desktop, there's a Current Drawing, there's Recents, there's Favorites. And it has this message here, Blocks are available across devices.

Well, if you click this, there's instructions. I already set up desktop, so web and desktop talk to each other. And if I go into Blocks, you see my favorite blocks are these three. In desktop, my favorite blocks are the same.

If I were to go to Recents, you can see there's some blocks in here. And I go to Recents over here, which is that one, same list. I'm going to close this. Actually, yeah, I'm going to close this. So you can see, it's the same set of files, right?

So what I'm going to do-- and then Favorites, if I make a favorite, that's going to be in here too. And so if I go back to the Current Drawing and I'm going to put this north arrow. Just dropped that in there. And you notice, I got a Recents here. There it is, it's already there.

And if I go here into the web and I go to Recents, it's not here yet. But if I waited a while, it would update. But if I force it or open the drawing, it it'll refresh it. There's that file-- that block, sorry. That block. Once it's done with this region, there it is.

That's web and desktop using the same list of blocks. Now, if I were to make this one the same one a favorite and I copy to my favorites, now it's in my favorites. Same thing on web. It's not here yet. But if I force it-- if I force it-- hmm?

There it is. There we go. Latency, performance. Imagine you're across different machines. Now, I'm doing everything on my same workstation, so it's a little-- what's the right way to put this? My expectations are higher than they should be, as far as how fast these things work.

If I'm on two different machines, two different offices, this is going to look great. So there we go with blocks. That's really awesome. Like I said, there's instructions on how to do this. Check it out.

The last thing I wanted to show everybody and one of my most favorite things we've done is that if I go back to my OneDrive and-- oh, sorry. My OneDrive. And I'm going to go into my Au folder and I'm going to-- it's going to load up. There we go-- Civil folder, just like before.

And say, I don't want to mess around with desktop. I'm in here right now. I see my list of files. I want to work on this erosion control plan. I don't want to go back to web to work on it. I just want to click it. That's one click.

So I'm already authenticated with web and OneDrive. And you can see it's working. All I have to do is click that file in OneDrive, it's going to open the drawing in a separate browser tab with all the XREFs just like I clicked it in AutoCAD web.

So you can either use AutoCAD web for your file navigation or you can use your native OneDrive interface. And there it is. It works out easy. In fact, I like it so much, I'm going to do it again. Site grading plan.

I would be careful not having too many tabs open with AutoCAD web. In the past, there were issues-- performance issues. It's a lot better now. But I would not leave a lot of these tabs open just running. It's going to slow your browser down.

But you can see, it's pulling in the XREFs. There's three this time. There we go. Here it comes. That's fantastic. The Box, Dropbox, Google Drive, they all work the same way as well. The interfaces are a little different. But there's always that ability to click or right click and open your file.

And there we go. And I can just keep opening things until my machine runs out of memory. And that is the end of the demo. And let me turn my camera back on. And we'll get PowerPoint back up. Come on, zoom.

OK, let's circle back on, why web? Everyone looked at the-- we all saw the demos. Technology is pretty cool. Hopefully, you have a better understanding of how it all works together. So let's go through why web.

No install. If you have the internet and you have the browser, it's always available anytime, anywhere. Solid foundation. AutoCAD web is the same code base as AutoCAD desktop for Windows. AutoCAD WS and AutoCAD 360 were not. And that led to a host of problems, but AutoCAD web is real AutoCAD.

Seamless integration with where you put your files. You don't have to use our storage. We prefer if you did. But if your files are somewhere else, then you can-- on one of these providers, you have access to it. If you would like us to add more or something different, let us know.

And then I don't like bringing this up, but it's true. The new normal really impacted AutoCAD web. When the pandemic hit, a year and a half ago, focus on web really became more important. And so the team responded and we've done a lot of really good work in the last year and a half. It hasn't been easy, but same thing for everybody else.

And then I wanted to make sure to include this. Like I said, in the demo, we have access points where you can send us feedback. You can tell us what you like, what you don't like. We love the information. Anything you send to us, we will all read and act on one way or another.

And then the Customer Council. AutoCAD web has been part of the Customer Council for over a year-- probably two years, three. So whenever we have new functionality, we'll turn it on for the beta community. So if you're part of the Customer Council and we enable a new feature in AutoCAD web for beta, you'll see it.

And then lastly, all support, feedback, complaints, it all comes across my desk. I see everything. And so to make things simple, I wanted to include my email. If you'd like to reach out to me, ask me questions, you're curious about anything, feel free.

I'm a I'm in the forum. I'm pretty active there. But if you want to talk to me directly, feel free. And that's it. That's all I have. Thank you for listening and paying attention.

I hope I answered some of your questions. If you have more questions, the Q&A is going to be right after this. And I will see you there. Thanks for attending. Have a good day.