说明
主要学习内容
- Learn how to implement the latest and most innovative features packed inside AutoCAD.
- Learn how to apply common AutoCAD commands in unique and creative ways to achieve dynamic outcomes.
- Learn about developing new and creative ways to optimize drafting workflows and increase efficiency with AutoCAD.
- Discover the secret tips that only AutoCAD veterans and gurus know.
讲师
- Donnie GladfelterDonnie Gladfelter is a globally recognized Autodesk expert with 25 years of experience in the AEC industry, driving innovation in technology, organizational, and talent development. As an Autodesk Certified Instructor and an award-winning Autodesk University speaker presenting for 18 consecutive years, he is a proven communicator able to captivate audiences exceeding 60,000 people with impactful presentations. Named one of Autodesk's Top 35 Young Designers Under 35, he is well known for The CAD Geek Blog (www.thecadgeek.com), six Autodesk Official Press books (AutoCAD and AutoCAD LT: No Experience Required), and contributions to industry publications including Autodesk’s Official AutoCAD Blog. Honored as an Autodesk Expert Elite Member, he specializes in crafting user-centered content and technology strategies that pursue intersections between people enablement, process development, and technology innovation.
DONNIE GLADFELTER: Well, sit down, buckle up, and keep your hands on your keyboard because you are attending the only session-- that I know of, at least-- that has a warning label on it, that this class may result in increased productivity, and lead to finishing your work early, having to find new and more creative ways to waste time in the office. Of course this session, we're talking about is this one here, "AutoCAD Tips, Tricks, and the Most Dynamic Drafting Techniques."
My name is Donnie Gladfelter, and I am the senior manager of technical learning and development at Bowman. We are a national civil engineering firm. In addition to that, I'm also an Autodesk Expert Elite member. I've been an Autodesk University speaker since 2007. And you can find me all over the internet on my blog, the CADGeek.com, articles on the official AutoCAD blog, some books and some other bits. In other words, don't really have much of a life outside of AutoCAD. But that is the very reason that I am here and you're here as well.
So with that, I don't want to waste any time. I want to get straight into AutoCAD and share some of the tips and tricks that I've prepared for you in this session. So with that, let's just take a moment here to talk about, well, what we're going to talk about. So in this particular session, we are going to focus on some of the new features inside of AutoCAD, take a look at some commonly used commands-- but maybe some unique spins on how to leverage those particular tools, and develop some new and creative ways, hopefully, to make you more productive in your everyday use of AutoCAD, and, of course, revealing some secrets along the way too.
So with that in mind, some expectations of this particular session. First and foremost, I assume that you've been using AutoCAD for at least an hour or two, right? And so with that, if you have any AutoCAD experience whatsoever, I'm quite confident that not every tip will apply to you, that you work in different industries, from architecture, to civil engineering, to facilities, to survey, to all the many ways that AutoCAD can be used across the many different industries that it serves.
To that end, just as not every tip will apply to you because of the industry you're in, not every tip will be new to you. Chances are, if you've been using AutoCAD for any period of time, you will have certainly discovered or found some of these tips. And so my hope in that case is that while not every tip will be new to you, that hopefully I can share a new perspective that helps you maybe further refine your approach, or, at the very minimum, validate your approach to how you do things as well.
And with that, this is the one that I love about presenting this particular session, that while I have a great deal of experience using AutoCAD myself, you too have quite unique experiences as well. And so in this session, I have packed in some of the ways that I have learned over the years of using AutoCAD. But I've also learned just as much from my audiences as well. So with that, I would invite you, within the course page on Autodesk University, to certainly comment and add your commentary, or certainly reach out to me online as well. I'd love to hear your feedback about the tips that I share today, and maybe the ways that you put them to work.
All right. So enough PowerPoint, right? Let's dive into AutoCAD and begin taking a look at some of the most delightful drafting techniques here.
So with that in mind, as we dive into AutoCAD-- we're using AutoCAD 2024 here. And while many of the tips that I'm going to share today are not version-specific, at least among the currently supported versions of AutoCAD, AutoCAD 2024 gave us a whole lot of really awesome things, I think, to talk about. So the first of these is something I'd like to refer to as personalization. So with that, let me jump over here to the Start tab.
The Start tab's has been inside of AutoCAD for quite some time. But we have seen some, I think, meaningful updates in this latest version of AutoCAD, the most notable of which is, I think, the Recent list here. So just like in previous releases, I can choose a grid view or I can choose a list view. Likewise, as I am working on drawings, I can pin a particular drawing to that Recent list. That will make it so it doesn't go away. These are all things that I've been able to do in previous versions of AutoCAD.
But where we get some new functionality in 2024 is I can now sort by things like when I last opened the file, what its name was. I can also come over here and search for things. So if I wanted to find my floor plan drawings, here are those particular drawings right there. So you can search for your recently opened drawings, and again be able to see that in either a list or grid view. I Really love this feature. While I certainly always have Windows Explorer up on my other screen, having quick access to these drawings I have found to be a really, really awesome addition inside of AutoCAD.
Now with that, inside of AutoCAD, we are seeing a whole lot of machine learning, artificial intelligence embedded inside of the software, to help all of us be a little bit more productive inside of the software. And one of the first ways that we see that is through something that is kind of given this umbrella term of My Insights.
The first of these I want to share with you is also on the Start tab. So let's jump back over to the Start tab real quick. And you'll notice that there is a tab here called My Insights. This is something that was in a beta preview in, I believe, the AutoCAD 2023 release. But it's now an official part of AutoCAD with 2024.
So what is this? Well, what you're going to see here is, if you're attending this class, it's because you want to find more productive ways to do things inside of AutoCAD. And that's exactly what My Insights is all about. As you use AutoCAD in your day-to-day workflows, it is taking a look at that, and matching it up with patterns that other AutoCAD users are using as well. And it is making recommendations.
So here are some insights that it has identified for me. And you can see some of these tips and tricks. So you'll see all sorts of tips and tricks pop up here. So here's a grip stretch one, based on working with grips that it has recommended for me.
Likewise, you can see how you're using the software. Where are you making the most use of the software? So here I have been using Annotation for about a third of my time, 29% of my time using the software, second to Object Modification, which isn't too big of a surprise. I think those are two things that we all do quite frequently.
Likewise, as you scroll through here, you can see that breakdown of how you are using the software. And I have found that these My Insights really do help expose, or at least bring to light, how I'm using the software, and help me kind of discover new ways to use the software as well. So if you haven't checked that out, and you want more tips after today's session, be sure to check out the My Insights tab inside of here as well.
All right. So next up, we have all had those drawings where, what the heck has happened? If you're in a support role, like I have been in for much of my career, the first thing I ask end users to do is, have you purged and audited the drawing? Make sure that it's free of errors? And of course everyone says, well, yes, I did that before I called you. Well, with Activity Insights, you can see if they're telling the truth or not.
So with that, let me come over here to my View tab inside of AutoCAD. And right here, under History, you will see an Activity Insights button. This does kind of complement that Drawing History, which is talking about how we've accessed the drawings. Activity Insights is tracking what happens inside of the file itself.
So with that, let me pull this over here. And here you can see this is all-- or these are all the edits that I have made to this particular drawing. I saved this as a AutoCAD tips live for this particular presentation. But before that, you can see some of the edits that I have made here as well.
Now, what I want to share here is, in addition to that, you also see when things were edited all along that entire timeline, even well before this-- before I used AutoCAD 2024. So you can see, I created this drawing file based on the AU 2022 Tips and Tricks presentation, and did a Save As there to build this particular presentation. And the Activity Insights tracks all of that.
So in addition to tracking events that happen inside of the drawing file, it is also going to track at least some of the activities that happen outside of the drawing file. So with that, let me move all this over.
So here I have a copy of this AutoCAD Tips and Tricks Base. Let me make a copy of this. And I will just quickly paste it. So there it is. It's called AutoCAD Tips Base Copy. And let me just go ahead and maybe call this everyone's favorite file name, Final Final Version 2. Right?
So with that, here is that particular drawing file. I just renamed that completely outside of AutoCAD. If I come in now to open up that drawing file, let's take a look at what we've got here. So if I come in here, here is that drawing. And if I open it up here real quick, let's take a look at what Activity Insights tells us about it.
So here you can see it has been saved as a new name. Actually, it didn't quite track that activity. It was supposed to. But it will typically track those activities as well.
So Activity Insights, a really handy feature, is also going to track, critically, those things like when drawings were purged, audited, all of those tips that we typically ask people to do before we really dive in to begin understanding what might be going wrong with a drawing file.
All right. So in addition to that, kind of complementing or enhancing some features that we've relied upon for many years now, being the File tabs and Layout tabs at kind of the top and bottom of our screen, in 2024 we have two new menus that are called the File Tab Menu and the Layout Tab Menu.
So if we take a look at what this is, here we find that hamburger menu. Again, I still don't know why we call this a hamburger menu. I think only heathens will do that to their poor hamburgers. Who flattens their buns?
But anyway, my tirade across the hamburger button aside, this will mirror kind of your file tabs inside of AutoCAD here. And just like your file tabs that run horizontally along the screen, here you get a menu, a vertical menu of those. And just like before, just like regular file tabs, you can switch over to any of those drawings just by hovering over them just like you do in the file tabs itself. The big benefit here is while it does mirror a lot of the functionality that we get with the horizontal tabs here, when you have a lot of drawings open, and you don't have any more space along the top of your screen, this replaces that kind of overflow menu, and makes it a heck of a lot easier for you to get to your active drawings.
In addition to that, while we certainly have the ability to continue right-clicking on our layout tabs, and access things like New Layout and From Template, we get icons in the menus now, which I find handy. Makes it a little bit easier to find what I need. But just like we have all of these contextual right-click menus on our model tab or our layout tabs inside of AutoCAD, we get this largely mimicked or mirrored inside of the Layout Tab Menu here as well.
So here you can access pretty much all the stuff that you could by right-clicking on the individual tabs. And again, we get those options, like, I want the layout tabs to be above my status bar because I have a whole lot of layout tabs in my drawing, or I want it the default. I want to get as much screen real estate as I can. So I'm going to dock it in the bottom of the screen there. We get all of those options from the Layout Tab Menu here as well.
All right. So let's continue on. This too was a new feature in a couple releases ago, maybe '22 or '23, and that is this concept of floating tabs. So what the heck is a floating tab?
Well, if you're anything like me, you typically have at least one, or two, or three drawing files open at any one time. And oftentimes, I want to work on those on two screens right, one drawing up on one of my screens, another drawing up on the second screen. And to do that, I've typically launched two sessions of AutoCAD.
And while you can certainly continue doing that, you can now, with the file tabs, if you need to work on multiple drawings at once-- so maybe I have this A-01 one and A-02 drawing, well, let's drag out the A-02 menu or file right here. And it pulls it out into its own window.
Now this is still inside of the same session of AutoCAD. And I could move that over to another monitor, or I could dock it side by side, like you see here, with the single screen that I am working on right now.
Similarly, you can also pin it so it will be at the top of your screen. So as I do work on the primary drawing here, maybe the A-01 drawing, it is on top of the current session of AutoCAD. Or you can change that so it's in the back.
Likewise, if you don't want it to be floating anymore, you can just pull it back and drop it right back on the File menu just like so. Put it right back where it was all along. So again, floating tabs I find to be really, really awesome, and a great way to work on multiple drawings at once.
So as we mentioned, over the last several years, we've seen lots and lots of this My Insights functionality get added to the software. And kind of building upon a feature we've had in the software for many years now-- if my memory serves me correctly, dating all the way back to 2009-- is Command Macro. So you might be wondering first, what is a command macro?
Well, if you come over here to the Manage tab inside of AutoCAD, you have the Action Recorder right here. And the whole idea is you can click this record button and then start doing some sort of tasks. So maybe I'll start drawing a line. And in a very simple example, I will just draw a quick little four-sided line here. You can see it has recorded everything that I did inside of the drawing. And once I'm done, I can just hit Stop, and I can call this maybe Line, LineSample, as an example.
Now the critical thing about this is you can't have any spaces. But in addition to that, whatever you type here as the name, first it's going to store it inside of a single file. And the name of that file will also be defined as a command inside of your AutoCAD.
So with this line sample, let me just click OK. That's going to save that particular command macro. Let me just delete this.
Now to play that macro back, I could come over here and hit Play, or I could just type in LINE SAMPLE right there. It's now defined as a command. And when I click on that, it is going to run that macro. And there it is.
So again, this has been functionality we've had in the software for many, many years now. But where AutoCAD 2023 or '4 expands upon that is this idea of My Insights being added to that.
So if you come over to the View tab, under Palettes, you'll find a button here called Command Macros. And if we click on that, it is going to take a look at the ways that you've been using AutoCAD, and make some recommendations. So some examples might include some of what you see here. But as an example, it has observed me using a multiple fillets. So I need to fillet things a bunch. And here it has recommended that to me.
So with that, if I had maybe some lines in this drawing here. And let me go ahead and save this multiple fillet, this is also going to be a command macro in your software. But now, if I click on Multiple Fillet, it I could type in a fillet radius, maybe 25. And now I have a command that will let me fillet multiple times inside of the drawing, versus having to exit out of the software and restart the fillet command over and over and again. since AutoCAD observed me using the fillet command multiple times, it has recommended that to me. And I can now use it as a command inside of my software, which I think is pretty awesome.
All right. So while I love any questions that you might have from this particular presentation I also get that I'm not necessarily in your office, sitting next to you all day, every day. So how can you get help outside of a forum like this, or even if you don't have that AutoCAD guru in your office, or you're out of the office?
This is also another feature that was previewed over the last couple of years, and now it is officially inside of the software. And it's something called the Autodesk Assistant. So what is this all about?
Well, if you look up in the InfoCenter toolbar, which is this little, maybe, help menu, as many people will refer to it, there is now a button here that says Autodesk Assistant. And if you click on this, it is going to open up a palette where you can basically chat with the software.
So you can do something like, why is my drawing slow? And it is going to recommend various items that could solve that particular issue, with various support articles and all sorts of stuff over the Autodesk website, to connect you with a solution to whatever your question might have. So the next time you have a question about how to do something in AutoCAD-- it could be as simple as, why is my drawing slow, or how to do something very simple inside of the software, or even maybe marginally complex-- give a go with the Autodesk Assistant and see what it can recommend for you. I think you will find it will recommend some really awesome workflows for you.
All right, so let's continue on here. So next up, I'm actually going to demo this tip before I unveil it. So I'm going to go ahead and select on this boundary for the next set of tips. And I'm going to click on the View Cube. We oftentimes think of the View Cube as just something that is there for 3D drafting. But in the context of 2D drafting, it can also be quite handy as well.
So with that, let me come over here and pick on this tip. And notice what I'm doing. I am picking on an object that I would like to zoom out to or zoom into. I want to basically fill the screen with whatever object that I have selected. I can select it inside of AutoCAD, and then just go ahead and click on the top inside of the View Cube, and it will zoom me into that particular object.
So I could zoom into this box. And I could zoom into this circle. Whatever you want, just pick on the object, click the top View Cube, and it will help you out there.
All right. So kind of continuing on this, how do we select objects inside of AutoCAD, or leveraging selections inside of AutoCAD, object isolation. So typically, when we need to work on things in AutoCAD, we'll maybe modify a layer, turn it on, off, freeze, thaw it. And you can certainly do that. But in crowded drawings, another tool that I like to use is object isolation. So what is object isolation?
Well, let's say, as an example, I only want to work with maybe the cube walls here. So I'm going to go ahead and pick a bunch of those cube walls in this particular case. I'm going to select those. I'm going to right-click. And I'm going to use the Select Similar Tool. That will select all the other cube walls in this particular area of my drawing.
And if I come down here to the status bar, there is a little icon with a bunch of shapes-- a circle, a square, and a triangle. And if you click on that, this is the Isolate Objects icon. And here I can say, isolate objects. And it's going to isolate everything that I had selected. And with that, since I did use the Select Similar, you can see, I can maybe quickly discover that I'm missing some line work for these two cubes here based on the layers.
So with that, I could certainly end the object isolation. In addition to isolating objects, you can also hide individual objects. So maybe I don't want to turn off all the furniture in the drawing, but I just want to maybe get rid of or hide these desks here. I can also come and say, hide objects, and see what's going on there.
So maybe there's a issue here with some layering. But those walls are maybe not entirely composed the way I want.
Now if you were thinking this would be a great way to play a practical joke on a friend, when you open the drawing, it resets any isolations that were in place when you last closed the drawing. So everything does go back to normal, even if your friends don't know about object isolation. So I know many of you were thinking, oh, this would be a great trick to play on a friend. Unfortunately, not so much.
All right, next up. Selection cycling. This is actually one I haven't added to my status bar here. Actually, I don't have it added to my status bar, but I do have it turned on.
Now what is selection cycling? Here I have a bunch of objects that are on top of each other. And it can be a little difficult to select the appropriate one, the one that I actually want. And certainly there are some other ways to do this, but selection cycling is one of my favorite ways to do this.
And the way to do this, it's not added to the Status bar by default. But if you click on the hamburger icon in the lower right-hand corner of AutoCAD, which is called Customize, you get all the different buttons or tools that you can add to your status bar. And one of them is this guy right here. It's called Selection Cycling. When you add that, it's going to add this little green box icon. And if you click on that, it will go ahead and turn on selection cycling.
Now with selection cycling turned on, what's going to happen here? Well, here, I have a bunch of objects that are stacked on top of each other. And when I get near those objects, I get in a place where AutoCAD isn't quite sure what I want to select. It's going to display two little square icons in the upper-right quadrant of my cursor. And that tells me AutoCAD's a little confused at what I want to do here.
So if I click on that right now, what it's going to do is it's going to display a list of all the objects it thinks I may have wanted to select. So maybe I want to select the yellow square here. In this case, I could go ahead and maybe just select that, hit Move, and move that like so. And just like that, I was able to find that particular object and move it using selection cycling.
All right. Continuing on. Offset. So, typically, when we use offset, we'll come up here. We'll run the offset command. It's going to ask me for an offset distance. I might type in something like 50 units, whatever that might be, and offset things.
But what if I needed to do 20 units now? Well, typically what I'd have to do is exit out of the offset command, restart it, type in 20, and then do the offset command again.
Now this is where I like to combine direct distance injury or dynamic input with the offset command, specifically the through option of the offset command. So what does this look like?
Well, let me go ahead and start the offset command. Here, instead of the default way, the way that most of us probably use the offset command of specifying an offset distance, I'm going to choose Through. And what this will allow me to do is I can click on this. It's also handy for I need something to be at a specific place, but I don't know the exact placement of that. So as an example, I need to offset this exactly between the midpoint of here and the midpoint of this line over here.
This is where you can combine this with object snaps. So maybe I'll do mid between two points. Maybe I'll do midpoint there to perpendicular there. And whatever that offset distance is, AutoCAD figured it out to do halfway between the two.
But in addition to that, in addition to being able to use object snaps to figure out offsets, you can also, with dynamic input turned on, which is this icon right here, you can go ahead and use direct distance entry. Because notice, with dynamic input turned on, I get a value right there at my cursor.
So here, if I wanted this to be 20 units, I could just type in 20. And that's going to offset it 20 units. If I want it to maybe do this 50 units, just offset it again and type in 50 units. And I can do variable offsets within one instance of the offset command. It's not the best tool for every situation, but it is an incredibly handy way to go about doing things.
All right. Continuing on, taking a look at hatches. So my background is in the civil engineering world. We use a lot of hatches. We also use drawings with really large coordinate systems. And this is a very common problem that we run into, which is broken hatch patterns, specifically with the hatch patterns that start with A-R inside of the software. That A-R in AutoCAD speak stands for "architectural." And so they're really meant for an architectural drawing of a quarter inch to a foot, or an eighth of an inch to a foot-- not 1 foot is equal to 50 feet, like we might have-- or sorry, 1 inch is equal to 50 feet like we might have inside of a civil drawing. And since we do have our drawings out in the millions of coordinates, we get rounding errors with our hatches, and we end up with something like this, where we wanted something like this.
So how do we fix it? Well, there's a couple of ways that we can do that. Easiest way, go ahead-- or one way, I'm sorry, is to just go ahead and pick on the hatch. And the contextual ribbon tab is going to open up right here.
One of the tools you're going to get is called Set Origin. And if you just do that, you can then pick any place-- it doesn't even have to be on the object. It could be out here somewhere. But just somewhere closer to the object. And that will fix it.
Why does that fix it? Well, by default, hatches are calculated from the 0-0 of the drawing. And so if you have millions of coordinates-- which, if you look at my coordinate values here, I am in the millions of coordinates-- you get these rounding errors. And when you set the origin, it just sets it closer, and you don't get the rounding errors.
Now in addition to picking on it and using the contextual ribbon, one of the other things you can do is, if you pick on a hatch, you will notice there is also a grip in the centroid of that hatch. It's a little circle grip. And if you hover over it, you could use multifunctional grips to specify that origin point. So I don't even have to really move my cursor away from the hatch. I can say, origin point, click someplace right there, and just like that I have fixed that hatch.
All right. And so continuing on with this conversation about hatches, let's come over here and take a look at another, I think, incredibly common situation, which is I have open areas that I need to hatch. I need to hatch maybe these cubes, but I don't have a closed area. Now you could certainly come up and draw a line and create a closed area. But who has time for that, right? Let's try to do things in a more efficient way.
So with that, let me kind of zoom in here to this cube. And let's start my hatch command right here. And I've got my hatch pattern. I've got my scale set-- in this case 48. But the critical thing is, obviously, when I hover over that area, AutoCAD doesn't find any closed areas. So it doesn't display a hatch for me.
But noticing that my opening is 2 feet 11 inches, just shy of 3 feet, I come over here to Options and set a gap tolerance. I always like to do a little bit more than whatever my openings are, whatever my gap is. So in this case, since it's technically 35 inches, I'm going to do 36.
And with that, if I come in now, and I click, it still doesn't give me a preview. But if I click, it's going to tell me what I already know, that a hatch boundary is not closed. What do I want to do? And here I can say, just continue hatching the area. And since I have that hatch gap tolerance set, it is going to find the area for me, and go ahead and close it.
What's also really handy about this is once you have that hatch, you can also come in and do something like recreate-- or, sorry-- recreate the boundary. So in this case, I want to create a polyline. And if you wanted to associate it or not, you can choose. But now I have a polyline here, and this can be a great, great tool, especially for folks who work in facilities management. And you create polylines of areas. Sometimes you can get the hatch command to work and recreate the boundary as needed.
All right, so continuing this idea of hatches, let's take a look at another scenario. So here is an example. I have just some random shapes, and I want to go ahead and hatch these as well. However, I don't want these circles to be included.
Now there's a couple of ways that you could go about doing this, including coming over here to the Hatch Options and use Island Detection. That would work in this situation.
But in addition to that, another area that I like to use this for is where I have a really complex area that I need to hatch, and the hatch command in AutoCAD is having a really hard time with that. So in other words, for those of you who work in civil, every hatch that you need to create where it's a really complex area, and AutoCAD's having a hard time solving that area, and it's not an island detection thing. It's just an object detection thing. So what can you do in that situation?
So if you come over here to the Boundaries panel of the Hatch Creation ribbon, and expand it out, notice there is this guy right here. It says Use Current Viewport. This is called a boundary set.
So by default, AutoCAD is looking at the entire drawing, and everything inside of it it's trying to leverage or consider, calculate as a potential boundary of your hatches. And certainly, when you have a really complex area, that can be way too much for AutoCAD to handle.
So to go ahead and pare that down to something that's a little bit easier for AutoCAD to process, you can create a custom boundary set. To do that, just click on this button right here. It's Select New Boundary Set. And if I click on that, I can just pick the items that I want AutoCAD to evaluate for my hatches.
So in this case, I'm going to pick those outer lines, not the circles in the center, and hit Enter. And now, as I hover over that area, it hatches just those green lines in this case, ignoring these circles in the center, which is, I think, a great, great deal there.
All right. So continuing on with some other drafting tips here, again, if you need to create parking islands or pills, especially for maybe annotations, if you need kind of that pill format, there's a number of ways you can do this. You could certainly do a two-point circle. But one of my favorite ways to do this is just using the Fillet command.
Now we are trained when we use the Fillet command, that I always have to specify a radius. So you might think, I need to calculate what is that distance to get the right radius. Don't worry about it. As long as the lines are parallel-- and that's the important part. You have to have good geometry. As long as they're parallel, you can pick those two lines, and it will just figure out what the radius is and create that pill or parking island, whatever you want to call it, for you.
All right. Continuing on another great little drafting tip that I love here is path arrays. So if you've used AutoCAD for any period of time, you know about polar and rectangular arrays. They've been in AutoCAD more or less since the dawn of time-- not quite, but pretty darn close at this point. But path arrays are its newer sort of brethren, so to speak.
And this, you can repeat any object. It can be a block. It can be another line. But it's a great way where you have instances where you need to repeat something along a path. So I use this a lot in parking lot layouts where, especially in this case, I have an arc right here. And then I have a line.
And of course, the arc is a little bit more difficult. Certainly the line, if I wanted to create maybe 9-foot-wide parking stalls, that's not that big of a deal. But it gets a little bit hairier when I have that curve. I could use things like measure and divide, but I still have to draw things, right? This is where the path array is going to save you so much time.
So if you expand out the array panel, or the array tool inside of the ribbon, you have the option here for path array. And here you can, just any other array, go ahead and pick on the object that you want to array. So I'm going to pick on that green line here. And then go ahead and press Enter.
And then it's going to ask me the path that I want to go ahead and repeat that by. So I'll go ahead and pick on the curb here, or the edge of pavement, as it might be. And it just kind of tries to fit things for me. That's not quite what I want.
However, if you come up here to your Array Creation ribbon tab, you can go ahead and change the between. Right now it's just sort of done a calculated amount of 7.8. But if I come down here, I want 9-feet-wide parking stalls, I'll just type in 9. And just like that, it has now created 9-foot-wide parking stalls across that entire span.
So with that, I now have all of my parking stalls. It created some extra ones here. Of course, I probably don't want this to be an array. And so I can just explode it and get rid of the extra lines that I don't want right there.
By the way, number one reason that AutoCAD users quit their jobs, they don't get "a raise." Sorry. Bad, bad jokes with the arrays. But nonetheless, continuing on from the CAD dad jokes.
So one of my other favorite commands is the Join command. Now the typical way that we want to use, or the typical way that we might use the Join command is-- again, I'll use Join right here, is I will have an arc or two arcs that have been broken and I want to mend them back together. And so when I do that it-- well, in this case, did it the opposite way of what I wanted. But if I do it in the correct order, it will do that. If I do this, it will mend that line together back as one. That's the typical way that we think of using the Join command.
However, I love the Join command for joining polylines. If these are not coincident or parallel-- or, sorry, linear. I'm sorry-- and I have an instance like this, it's going to convert it into a polyline. So it basically does what the P-edit Multiple command will do.
But I can just type in J for join, which I love. It's just a one-keyboard shortcut. I can just type in J for join. Select the lines that I want to join. Hit Enter.
And now I didn't get the P-edit. Do you really want to turn this into a polyline? I didn't get all those sort of prompts. I just hit J for join. Selected my lines. Selected my arcs and lines. And it created a polyline for me.
All right. So continuing on, let's talk about grip editing inside of AutoCAD. Now when we typically grip edit, most people are going to pick on-- whoops-- an object, and they will just pick up one grip, and they'll do something like this. They'll go ahead and maybe stretch this out. And maybe I want to pull this up some area like so. That's totally fine.
But you can pick more than one grip. And so with that, if I just select on the object like I did before, I'm going to press and hold Shift. While I'm pressing and holding Shift, I can select as many grips as I want on that particular object.
The benefit of this is, this span here is going to stay exactly as it is. So I could go ahead and pick on that. Notice the Eastern edge of that box is the exact distance it was to start with. And here, I can just go ahead and pull things over like so to grip edit that particular box there. So selecting multiple grips, one of those oversight or one of those things we overlook a lot, but can be an incredibly powerful thing that we can do inside of the software.
All right. Next up, talking about grip editing. Modify commands. So here is an example. I have a box. Typically, when I pick on, or not typically, when I pick on the object and I start grip editing, the default is I get a version of the Stretch command. And that's exactly what's happening here. I'm more or less stretching that corner.
But lesser-known thing you can do is press the spacebar, and this will begin cycling through, or toggling through some basic modify commands. So here I'm doing Move. If I press the spacebar again, I'm doing Rotate. If I press the spacebar again, I'm now doing Scale. Press the spacebar again, I'm doing Mirror. And if I press the spacebar again, I am back back to Stretch.
So I like to-- maybe I need to move objects a lot. Just, it's kind of become muscle memory for me. I start grip editing. I press the spacebar once. I am in the Move command. And I can move that over like so.
Maybe I want to rotate this arc from this point here. I can just press space a couple times. I am now in the Rotate command. And I'm able to begin modifying that without coming up and using all the various modify commands.
By the way do you know where astronauts go to get a drink? On the keyboard. The space bar. I'll be here all week. Don't forget to tip your waitresses.
All right continuing on. Probably one of the least-used or less-used object snaps is from inside of AutoCAD. So where might I use this?
Now here's an example of a simple parking lot. Obviously, this line is supposed to be parallel to the others, but it is not. Now I might redraw this. There's a number of ways I might go about doing this. But I can grip edit this right back into place.
The critical thing is I want to make sure that I have Parallel turned on. I'm also going to make sure that I have Intersection and Extension turned on as well to make this really work for me. So with that, I am going to begin clicking on this end, which is the end that I want to modify. I want to stretch it, right? But I don't quite know what the angle is, or I do in this case, but I don't maybe know what that angle is. So what can I do?
Well, I want to keep this point where it is, but I want to move this point to be parallel to the others. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to Control right click, get my Object Set menu. I'm going to choose From.
With the From option, I'm going to go ahead and pick the base point of that line, the part of it that I don't want to move. And with that, I can now hover over the line to acquire the parallel point. And I can then do some point acquisition here, and go ahead and pick. Whoops, I think the extension got me there. Let me try that again.
So I'm grip editing. I'm going to Control right click. I'm going to choose From. I'm going to pick the endpoint right there. Notice I have the line attached. That's what I didn't have a moment ago.
I'm going to go ahead and just hover over one of the lines that I want to make it parallel to. That's going to acquire it. And now I can also take that a step further by acquiring another point doing object snap tracking, and just acquire that point, and click. And now that line is perfectly parallel. It's also the right length because I used object snap tracking. So the From object snap is an object snap with super powers that we oftentimes overlook.
All right, continuing on. Multifunctional grips. We already took a look at this a little bit with hatches just a little while ago. But many objects inside of AutoCAD have multifunctional grips. So lines are one of them that I absolutely love. Oftentimes, I need to extend a line by a certain distance. So I could certainly use the Linking command.
However, if I just pick on the object, hover over the grip that I want to lengthen, I can come over and just hover-- I'm not clicking. I'll just go ahead and choose Lengthen. I can now lengthen that line.
Notice I get dynamic input as well. So if I wanted to lengthen it by maybe 150 units, notice I'm in that direct distance entry. I can just type in 150. Just like that, I have extended that line by 150 units at whatever its bearing was to begin with. We also have this for arcs, where I can go ahead and lengthen that as well, just like so.
And something that is new to multifunctional grips inside of AutoCAD is the ability to extend a point on a polyline. So we've had multifunctional grips for polylines for quite some time. However, there is a new option for polylines called Extend Vertex. I like to use this with that parallel object snap that we were just using from the From a moment ago.
So if I say Extend Vertex, I'm going to go ahead and just hover over that existing line to acquire that parallel. And now I can go ahead and extend out that line by whatever distance I need without changing its bearing. So that Extend is a super-handy function that's been recently added to polyline multifunctional grips.
In addition to that, we also have multifunctional grips for things like leaders or multileaders. So if I hover over the multileader, I could say, Add Leader and go ahead and click and add as many leaders as I need. I don't have to go up to the Annotate tab and do things that typical way. I can just use it with grips.
Dimensions are another example of this. I want to dimension this run of boxes. Just select on one of the dimensions, hover over it. You can do Continue, and go ahead and add those dimensions. If you need a overall dimension, just hover over it and say baseline dimension, and go ahead and select on that. I need to work on the spacing, but otherwise I have added all of those dimensions, just like so. Easy peasy, right?
All right. Let's continue on. Annotation. Making text uppercase or lowercase. Now if what you're working with is multi-line text, you can just go ahead and click into that. And we can, of course, select it. We have this great little text editor at the top here. And we do have buttons for things like uppercase or lowercase. So I could go ahead and make that uppercase or lowercase.
However, if you don't want to go up to the ribbon, and you want to change the case of your text, press Control-Shift and U or L-- U for Uppercase, L for Lowercase. So I can go ahead and toggle between uppercase and lowercase like so.
Now where I really love this little tip is that in addition to that, it also works for single-line text. So here is single line or [? D-text. ?] I don't get that text editor at the top. But I can still press Control-Shift-L to make it lowercase or Control-Shift-U to make it uppercase without having to convert it into multi-line text and get that button.
All right. Continuing on, I don't really have anything to demo here, but I just want to point this one out. This is a new feature inside of AutoCAD 2024, and that is if you're using SHX fonts-- what do I mean by SHX fonts?
So in this case, you can see, these are fonts. They react to your line weights, right? If you put them on a bolder line, they plot bolder. They're technically rendered, though, to your PDFs as linework. These are carryover from when AutoCAD was invented in 1982, and everything had to be aligned in order to plot it on a pen plotter.
Of course, in modern times, we have things like truetype fonts, which is what I have here for this Autodesk University text. That will always print to your PDF as text. It will be searchable. It would be like any piece of text in any other PDF that you've ever created. However, if you plot these pieces of text that are using the SHX text, they are going to plot to your PDF as lines, not text.
So in '24 they gave us some additional tools that will help me do that. Now we've had some toggles in my output settings in the past, but this has been expanded. We have a new system variable called PDFSHX.
And you have three options. You can say it's not going to add any comments or text to the drawing. It will render the contents of the SHX text as comments to the PDF, or it will render it as hidden text inside of the PDF and you can set it to 2. Do you want to emphasize this is a system variable, not a drawing variable. So it will apply to every drawing, not just a single drawing.
All right. Continuing on, another new feature that I absolutely love-- this is a small but I think really, really time saving new feature, and that is the ability to convert mtext into a multileader. So if we look at that other example over here, where I needed to label the box corners in this case, well, in this case, maybe I do need that to be a leader. But there's not one here currently.
No big deal. I'm just going to come up here to Leader. And by default, we still get the same default behavior, where I'm going to pick on the arrow head first, and then place the text. And so that still is the default behavior.
However, starting in 2024, we have a new option. If I come down here, I can choose Content First when I launch the multileader command. And if I choose Content First, I get an option here called Select Mtext. So if I select mtext, I can come in now and pick on that mtext. And just like that, it's going to add a multileader. And just like before, once I place the first multileader, I can always use those multifunctional grips to add an additional leader.
All right. So let's continue on. Next up, dimensions.
So here I have two dimensions. They're clearly the same length, but one of them is a lie. Which one is it?
So the secret here is when you have things like this, you can use the DIMREASOCC. Now this is not to be confused with the Dimension Re-associate command-- this guy here. This is Dim Re-associate. This is not the button. The button you're looking for is over on the Express Tools tab of the user interface.
And if you take a look over here, there is the Dimension panel here, and there is this guy here. It is called Reset Text, or its command line version is DIMREASOCC. If you pick on this, you can pick on your dimensions, like so, and it will find the dimensions that have been overridden and put them back to the way they're supposed to be. So, obviously in this case, the dimension on the right, or the east, was incorrect, and it has set that back to 40 feet for me.
All right. So here is another one here. Here I have two line types. One is rotating all the way around. The other one is upside down. What is going on here?
So this is a lesser-known parameter in your line type. So if I take a look at the behind the scenes here, this is the dot lin file that is defining each of these two line types. And essentially, the one on the right where it is upright all the way around, it has this parameter here-- u equals 0. If you want to add this to your existing line types, just open up your dot lin file, type in comma, u equals 0, and load the line types back in, and everything will work.
Notice the one on the left is using the AU normal style, and it is upside down. So add the upright parameter u equals 0 to your line types, and you won't have to fiddle with the Reverse command anymore.
Now, talking about line types, how could you create a line type like this? I use line types a lot to annotate text, or annotate things like pipelines and whatnot inside of my drawings.
So the secret to that is draw the line type that you want at the plotted scale. So that's the critical part. Not the scaled up. Not the 1-to-50 version, but 1-to-1 version, right? And in this case, I have a line type. I think this is about, I don't know, a inch or so long. So this is 3 inches long, with a piece of text in the center. It is dtext, not mtext.
Now with that composed, all I need to do is come up here to the express tools once again, expand out Tools, and there's a command right here called Make a Line Type.
I'm going to go ahead and call this AU LIVE, hit Save. It's going to ask me for the line-type name. I'm going to say just AU-- just call it AU. That's fine. You can give it a description. I could do something like dash, dash, dash, AU, dash, dash, dash is my description. Hit Enter.
Now it's going to ask me to specify the starting point of the line. So I'll just go ahead and use my object snap to snap to the geometry of my drawing. The endpoint of the line, we're going to go all the way out to here. And now select the objects. I'll just go ahead and pick on the lines, and the text, and press Enter.
Just like that, I now have a line type. So if I Zoom out, we are at 1-to-50 here. So let me go ahead and pick on this line.
And if I come over here, let me change the line type to that new style that I just created called AU. Just like that, there is that line type inside of my drawing. Pretty easy, right? So make line type, you can make this complex, or you can make line types with text really, really easily to sketch them and create your line file. And it's just as easy as that.
Next up, editing attributes. Typically we'll just double click into this and open up my Block Attribute Manager, or the Batman command, and I can change the values. But in a case like this, I don't really need to bring up that whole menu. I just have one value that I need to change. Press and hold the Control key and double click. This will suppress the Block Attribute Manager. And I can just go ahead and type in 12, as an example, or whatever that number might need to be, and edit that.
You can do it for blocks with multiple attributes here as well. Again, 1.20. If you do this, though, you will have to modify each one individually, like so. But you can do it for any block attribute. Just press and hold Control.
So next up, exploding blocks. Typically, we don't want to explode blocks. But if we need to, right? If you've ever exploded a block with an attribute in it, you probably didn't get the result that you expected, right? So you did something like this, and that is what you got. It exploded it back to its raw definition. And that is probably not what you wanted to do.
This is another case where the Express tools come to the rescue, because over here we have a Explode Attributes command right here, under the Blocks panel. It's called BURST is the command, if you want to type it in your command line. But I can press that command, the BURST command. Press Enter, and those blocks with attributes explode the way that you expect them to.
All right. Probably the most funly-named command that I know of, at least, inside of AutoCAD, and "funly" is a real word, if you are curious. Maybe not. Don't trust me on that. But do trust me on this.
So TSPACEINVADERS. This is a fun command. It's not documented in the software. But what does it do? Unfortunately, it does not bring up, like, an Easter egg game of Space Invaders. However, what it will do, if you type it in, TSPACEINVADERS, is you can select objects. So select all of those objects right there. And what it's going to do is find the text that is invaded by objects in your drawing.
So here I can skip through each one. Yes, I'll skip through that. And let's create a new selection set.
And so what it's done is it's found the text that has geometry that overlaps it. So I can quickly find that geometry that has text over top of it-- and so that text isn't terribly plan readable-- and do something about it in a new selection set. So it didn't select this one, but it did select that one. TSPACEINVADERS is your command there.
All right. Continuing on, let's take a look at this. Collaboration. There's some really awesome collaboration features inside of the software today. Let me come over here to my Start tab and open up this mountain view cabin drawing as an example.
So let's say I wanted to share this with somebody. Not sure where the [INAUDIBLE] floor, isn't showing there, but that's OK. If I come over here to Collaborate, I can go ahead and share the drawing right there.
What is this going to do? Well, it is going to take the entire drawing, any textiles that are needed, any xrefs, any images. It's going to bundle all of those up, kind of like the ETRANSMIT command, and upload it to AutoCAD Online. I can upload this as a view only, or I can upload it as an editable object as well.
If I do the edit, the person on the other end will be able to make modifications, download it, add some other things to it as well. Maybe I just want to do the View Only. Let me go ahead and do that. I'll say Preview. And that is going to upload that drawing.
And it's going to open up my web browser, where I'm going to see that drawing right here inside of my web browser just like I saw it. And it's view only, so the person on the other end cannot download it, but they can certainly interact with it. They can look at the layers. They can query things. They can take measurements. All of that right here in their web browser. But they can't actually get the drawing file itself. So this is a great, just really quick and easy way to share a drawing file with somebody that you might need to collaborate with, just like that.
All right. Next up, Markups and Markup Assist. What is up with this? So let me come over here to this drawing right here.
So maybe I'm working with my project manager. Maybe I did a field visit, and I printed out my drawing, and I just hand-marked-up things that I observed in the field, and I need to get that back here into AutoCAD. What can I do?
Well, if you scan it, maybe take a photo with it with your phone, that's all you need to do, you can get those to overlay directly inside of your drawing. So to do that, once again, on the ribbon-- come over here to Collaborate. Under Traces, I'm going to click on this button here called Markup Import.
So what this is going to do is I can browse out and pick on an image. So this was just taken with a mobile phone of a plan that maybe I took out into the field. And here I can take that JPEG. I can go ahead and hit Open. And it's going to look at my drawing. It's going to look at the contents of that drawing file, and figure out how to scale, insert, rotate, all of that particular markup. And it's going to overlay it inside of my drawing.
If it didn't get it right, I can always move it and tweak it. Looked like it did a really good job here. I'm going to go ahead and say Accept.
And now, if you take a look at this, it has overlaid the hand markups that I did in the field, and it suppressed the printed version. And here I can come in and begin working on this particular drawing.
Now if you give it a moment to process, it will actually do some OCR on these notes and let you insert those as well. It takes a little while to process. But that's another thing it can do too.
You can also bring in PDFs that maybe you've marked up with another piece of PDF software, and bring those in as well using the Markup Import. A great way to integrate or incorporate those markups in your drawing.
All right. Coming into almost the home stretch here. All right. So blocks. We use blocks a lot. We got the New Insert tab, or the Block tab, a few releases ago. And it has some really awesome new features, awesome features inside of it. One of my favorites is the Synched Libraries, or just Libraries in general.
So here I have my Blocks palette. Let me go ahead and open this up here. So of course, we have our current drawing tab. And this shows all of the blocks that I have in this drawing. I can go ahead and Insert any of those. Nothing too terribly earth-shattering there.
However, if I come over here to Recent, it's going to take a look at all of the recent blocks that I have inserted into my drawing. And if I'm on this tab, notice there's a little cloud icon right here. So here, if I click on this, if I specify a cloud location-- so be it Autodesk Drive, be it OneDrive, Dropbox, any of the major cloud service, cloud storage providers, it's going to sync it across all of my AutoCAD installations-- AutoCAD and a vertical, AutoCAD and AutoCAD on web and mobile. Wherever I'm using AutoCAD, my blocks are going to be available to me. And it's going to sync across. So here I can say, remember my cloud storage across my devices. And here are my recent blocks.
Now where this gets really, really awesome is with libraries. So I've already added it in this drawing. Here are all the National CAD Standard block libraries or block files in this particular drawing here. If I come up here, I can click on Libraries. I can point it to an entire directory. So maybe you have a directory of details.
Or if you pick on an individual drawing file-- so here's the National CAD Standards Division I drawing file-- if I click on Open, it will look inside of that file and find all of the blocks in here as well. And you can insert any of those into your drawing. Easy peasy.
So here is a block for [INAUDIBLE] I believe, or number elevation. You can go ahead and insert that inside of your drawing. And straight from National CAD Standards, there is that particular symbol inside of this drawing file.
Now the libraries, again, because I have specified that cloud storage location, it's synced everywhere that I'm using AutoCAD. And maybe I use this particular block over and over and over again. Well, just right-click on it, say Copy to Favorites.
So inside of that file, it's going to go ahead and basically bookmark it. And now I have access to that particular block. It's still looking inside of the drawing file. But I can access that block just from the Favorites tab inside of your drawing. So it's an awesome, awesome way to access your favorite blocks, your recent blocks, and also sync your libraries across all of your different devices.
All right. So that's been in the software for some time now. However, just an outstanding feature, I think, inside of AutoCAD 2024, is this new idea of smart blocks. Now what smart blocks are going to allow me to do is basically interact with blocks a little bit more fluidly inside of my drawing.
So here I have a cube layout. I need to maybe add the furniture to the other cubes here. Well, not a big deal. Let me come over here. Let me just make sure I have the right layer. And I'm going to--
Let's see. What is that? That is going to be DESK2 is what is inserted there. So let me go ahead and pick on DESK2.
As I come in here now, yes, the insertion point is there, but it is looking at how I might want to insert that drawing or insert that block. I can press Control, and it will look at the other ways that it thinks that I might want to insert that block. And it's looking at the ways that the blocks have been inserted in other parts of the drawing.
So again, you can toggle through the ways that it's placed. So that's that one. Let me just come in here. And maybe we want to put this in this corner here. We'll just get right there.
And just like that, I'm not really worried about object snaps. I'm just making sure that those guides appear on my screen. And just like that, my blocks are placed inside of the drawing. It's an outstanding feature. It really helps add blocks to your drawing much faster than working with insertion points and all that kind of good stuff.
All right. So here's another one. Here, I have another run of cubes that's been completed. However, these guys are still using computers from, I don't know, the 1990s, 1980s. They have the big CRT monitors. Maybe you want to upgrade them, put some flat-screen monitors on their computers. So I have another block in this drawing called COMPUTER2.
Now there's a couple of things that I can do here. I'm just going to go ahead and pick on a couple of these, or I'm going to go ahead and just pick on all of these, really, or at least a majority of them.
So I can pick on the computers that I want to upgrade, let's say. And with those selected, as long as I have the same block selected, I come over here to Replace in the Properties palette.
This will bring up a suggested block. It's going to try to scan the drawing and find the blocks that it thinks that I might want to insert. However, I can also find it here too. So here's that COMPUTER2. I'm just going to go ahead and click on that. And I can either redefine it, or-- yes, I'm going to redefine it because it is already in this drawing. But just like that, it has inserted that new block with the flat-screen monitors across all of those workstations. I've just quickly replaced all of those using the same insertion and all of that. So Replace Block. Awesome, awesome new feature.
All right. Continuing on here. Let's take a look at some analysis.
So we have our inquiry commands. A lot of us use Distance and Area and whatnot. But Quick is an option that has grown on me in recent years. What's Quick all about?
It is the default now. But a couple of things that it does. First off, I just click on it, and it starts measuring everywhere. So I want to measure the opening. I'll just hover over this, and I can see it's 100 units. I want to see how wide this is. It is 100 by 125.
I want to make sure that my lines are orthogonal, that they're not 89.99 degrees. Notice I get the right angle icon right here. So I can just quickly validate my geometry, zooming in to the different areas, and making sure everything is 90 degrees. And it is.
I want to figure out the area of this shape, whatever it might be. Just go ahead and click inside of it, and it's going to calculate the area. It's more or less all of your measure tools just combined into one, and all you've got to do is just launch the command and you've got those tools for you. So Quick Measure, awesome, awesome new tool.
All right. So Quick Calculator. Let's come over here to view real quick. Let me open up my calculator. So here's a quick calculator, the on-screen calculator.
Now what I love about this. Let's say I need to offset this by a third, right? I want to divide this area by 3. I don't know what the distance is. No big deal.
The quick calculator, in addition to doing typical calculator things, can also interact with your drawing. So as an example. here is the Distance command, basically, distance between two points. So let me just go ahead and do distance to there to there. It measures that value. I can just go ahead and do any arithmetic that I might want. So maybe divide it by 3. There is my value 83.333333. Perfect.
So let's come in here now. I'm going to do my Offset command. It's going to ask me for my offset distance. I don't need to type this in and accidentally fat finger it. I can go ahead and just click this here. Paste value to command line. It has pasted that to my command line. I'll just press Enter. And just like that, I can now calculate or create that area divided by 3.
All right. Continuing on, linear fields. So fields are one of my favorite features inside of the software, and one of my favorite ways to use it is to get linear quantities where some increment, some multiple, is equal to 1. I use this a lot for parking spaces, but you can use it for any number of things-- occupancy tables. A certain amount of square footage is equal to one occupant. Anything that you can calculate with a field, you can use this concept on.
So here I have a piece of multi-line text. I'm going to come up here. I'm going to insert this as a field. I am going to use Objects, and then Object, and let's go ahead and pick on this line here in the back.
So I happen to know that the distances are 50 units wide, or the lines are 50 units wide. I'm going to come in here and report on a length property. Here it's currently showing me 300 feet. However, if I come down here to additional format, I can do a conversion factor.
So what is my conversion factor? Well, like I said, I happen to know that the distance here is 50 units. So here's another kind of quick tip. I'm going to do 1 divided-- equals 1 divided by 50. If I press Alt and Enter, AutoCAD is going to resolve that expression right here inside of my dialog. Pretty much any dialog or any text input that you can input a value for, it can do that as well.
Let's get rid of the trailing zeros and hit OK, and OK. And just like that, that is now updated to show six units. So if I stretch this out by another 50 feet and do a quick regen, it's going to tell me 7. So it's a great way to calculate numbers based on the geometry in my drawing.
All right. So let's take a look at some other really handy block analysis tools that we have inside of AutoCAD to wrap things up. So over here, I have a typical floor plan. And maybe I want to count all of the chairs. So something you might do is you might pick on the chair. And a kind of oldie but goodie tip at this point is you can select on that chair. You can right-click and say Select Similar.
This is one of my favorite ways to get a quick quantity count. And using the Properties palette, it will tell me a block reference. I have 87 chairs in this drawing.
But what if I just wanted to count the chairs in this area of the drawing? I don't want to count all the chairs. I just want to count the chairs in this area. Well, let me go ahead, and with those selected, I'm going to right-click again.
And I have an option now called Count Selection. This is going to use the new count functionality inside of AutoCAD. And when I do that, it's going to show all of the chairs in this case, just like so. But I can specify an area. So if I come in here, let's go ahead and draw a box around that area. And let me hit Enter, and let me pick on those chairs again. Whoops. I should be able to hit P for Previous. But if I pick on those, it's going to select just the chairs in that area-- or, sorry. Select Count it. There we go. Let me do a field. Come on. Sorry. I'm going to come over here to the Count palette.
All right, Count palette. Back to list. Let me do all of the chairs in that area. There you go. It found eight right there. And if I want, I can say Insert Field Count like so, and insert that into the drawing. And I now have a count of 8 in that area.
Now what's really awesome about this, though, is just by opening up the Count palette-- so let's talk about how we get to the Count palette. If I come over here to View under Palettes, there's a new button here called Count. And this is just going to count all the blocks in your drawing in real time. And so I can see that I have 69 computers and 6 COMPUTER2s in this case.
Now what is really handy about that, though, is in this area, if I wanted to just calculate maybe the northwest part of the building, I can say Count in Specified Area, and limit the count just to this area. And now it's just going to show me the count there.
And maybe I want to create a table of this. So how many different types of desks do I have? So let me pick my two desk blocks there. I'll choose that. And I'll hit Insert. And now I can go ahead and insert that as a table inside of my drawing that, if I scale up, is dynamic. So if I add another desk, and I hit Regen, it is going to update the count of my blocks-- so, 4 to 5 in this case.
Now in addition to that, our blocks are only as-- our block counts are only as accurate as our block insertions. And something else you'll notice is there are some shields here in this drawing, specifically for my 20 or 36-inch door. There's a shield. What's that about? Well, let's click on that.
So if I click on this, this is also analyzing my drawing. And what it's finding is areas where maybe I have inserted the same block multiple times. So here's an overlapping object. I can click on it. It found that right here. So I currently have 37 doors. But if I select on this here, you'll see that I have two in that area. So if I just go ahead and erase one of those, it is going to update my count and get rid of that shield for me as well.
Now, in addition to that, I have a rectangle block that is, I think, used for the columns in this drawing. Let's take a look at that. I have 516 of those. So if I click on these, not only does it detect multiple insertions. It also detects where you may have inserted the block, but exploded it at some point in your use of the software. And you can come in and correct that as well.
So this count palette, since so many of the things that I use, and I need to do quantity takeoffs inside of AutoCAD, is a big part of what I do on a daily basis, I absolutely love the Count palette inside of AutoCAD. And one of the newer features is the ability to limit it to a specified area.
All right. And with that, those are the tips and tricks that I have prepared for you. I would love to hear how you are putting these tips and tricks to work. What tip did you find most dynamic? I'd love for you to share it in the course page on Autodesk University.
Or reach out to me online. You can find me all across the internet. The main place that you'll find me is at the CADGeek.com. That's my web page. You'll find me on Twitter, LinkedIn. Addresses are here on the screen. I'd love to hear from you, how you're putting these to work. Maybe there's a new way that I didn't use in this particular demonstration that you found to put these tips to work. I'd love to hear that as well.
And so with that, as you put these tips and tricks to work, I wish upon you, happy drafting.