AutoCAD Tool Palettes Management Lab (Planning and Preparation, Not Perspiration) (REPEAT)

PAUL MUNFORD: Well, good morning, everybody. Welcome to AU. How many people are at AU for the first time? Wow, quite a few. How many people have never been to a lab AU. Can I let you a secret? This is my first lab AU. Not the first one I've been in, the first one I've presented, so be gentle with me, OK? So welcome along to this class. This is AutoCAD Tool Palettes class. So I'll just show you this slide to begin with, just to make sure everybody's in the right room, OK?

So today we're going to be doing a step by step introduction to maintaining your CAD standards to using tool palettes. I've tried to make this, rather than make it too generic and not have it work for everybody, I've tried to make it very specific. So it's a very specific step by step workflow that we'll go through to show you how to deploy your tool palettes across your server. So I'm kind of hoping that you'll get to take this away and have a go at it and then apply it in your company.

So if you are using an AutoCAD vertical, like simple 3D architectural desktop, there might be something in there for you to use. So in this class, I'll help you better complete completely fresh tool palettes in a network location, create, edit, and save tools in the network pallets, and boost your productivity and share to add scripts and macros to your palettes. Hack your tool palettes without opening AutoCAD. Well, there's something about that in the handout.

Unfortunately we couldn't do that today, because it requires an XML editor, and I couldn't get one installed on the machines for you, so that bit you'll have to take a look at. So I'll just introduce myself. My name is Paul Munford. I'm an application engineer for an Autodesk reseller in the UK called Graitec. So my job is to help our customers get the best out of their investment in their Autodesk software. But until two years ago, I was a CAD manager at a company making bespoke high quality furniture, and tool palettes were right at the heart of the way I put castanets to get to help our people work more efficiently.

Today our lab assistant's up the back there. So if you turn around and give him a wave-- give him a wave, everybody. So these guys are all CAD managers in their own right, and they're people that I am fans of. So I'm really so pleased to have them here. And Autodesk university is all about networking. So whatever you do, whatever problems you're having at work, there will be somebody in this room who's had the same issue. So do speak to people while you're here.

Speak to people in the line up for the gent's. Speak to people at breakfast. Speak to people when you sat next to them in the class. Say hi. Swap business cards. The contacts you make at Autodesk University will be as valuable as the information you take away. And there's four great contacts in the back there, so if you want to introduce yourself, anytime.

The lab assistants there to help you. So if something unexpected happens, if you're getting a little bit behind with the exercises, if you have a question, just put your hand up and one of these guys will run in and help you out. So the way this is going to work out today, I've got a short presentation to give you first just to set the scene for what we're going to do today and why we're going to do it. Then I've got a series of exercises for you.

There's an exercise handout PDF, which we open up on the machine. So it should be ready and waiting for you. Did everybody get the message that there's no printed handouts at Autodesk University? OK so you've either got the one on the machine, or if you've got it downloaded onto your handheld device you might better follow along with that. I'm going to demonstrate each exercise before we do it, and you'll have a couple of minutes to do the exercise.

Please watch the demonstration all the way through, right? Don't try and follow what I'm doing on the screen at the same time, because, as you're looking up and down, you might see some clicks. Just watch the presentation, and then you've got the handout. You can follow it through. I may have to sort of stop at each point and say we've run out of time on the exercise. So if you haven't finished, I'm sorry, but watch the next presentation. We'll move on to the next one. But the guys, again, in the back there can help you out if you get too far behind.

So let's just begin with the presentation. So tool palettes to me are about CAD standards. And the whole idea about CAD standards, for me, it's not about me being so OCD or being worried about the way our drawings look. In fact, I'm not that worried. So one of the guys at my office once said this to me, "I don't want to be able to tell who did this drawing until I look in the Title Block." And I thought, well why? Because back when we used to do drawings by hand, you could tell who did the drawing. You could tell from the way we draw lines, let alone the way we did our lettering.

So is that really of a benefit? I thought, to me that's not really the benefit of CAD standards. The benefit of CAD standard is that we don't have to spend time thinking about line waits and line types and what func should we use. To me, that's not value out when we're drafting. When we're drafting, we're thinking about am I delivering to the customer? Am I delivering to the quality? Cover my internal costs. Am I delivering on quality? And am I delivering to my company? Am I thinking about the best design I can come up, the most efficient, one that's going to cost us less but still delivers to the company?

That's what I want my drafters thinking about. I don't want them thinking about line waits and line types, all that stuff. That should just be kind of set. So the reason why is something called decision fatigue. I don't know if you've come across the expression. It's this idea that more decisions you have to make in the day, the less quality. The quality of your decision goes down you start to kind of flag. But I've actually proved this with judges, doing court cases, that their decision making ability flags until they have lunch, and then they feel better and then it goes down again.

So I don't know, Steve Jobs always used to wear the same outfits and I heard Barack Obama would choose to eat the same meals. And it's not because they are not creative or not interested in that stuff. It's because they didn't want to make decisions about those things. Just forget about that stuff. I've got more important things to make decisions about. Yeah, so I don't want people making decisions about layouts and the way things look. I want them making decisions about the end product, not the drawing itself.

So I put an example here of something I wouldn't mind, right? So putting text in bold text, it kind of violates my CAD standard, but I don't mind. I appreciate this person was concerned about this note, right? So I think it's good they're concerned. I want them to make a small violation in the CAD standard. I'm not worried. That's not going to cause anybody any problems. It didn't take long to do. I would draw the line at this one.

You spent a long time messing up my CAD standard to produce something that looks worse. That's too far. So I don't want people doing this. I want all this to be set. I want the CAD to be so easy to use that they prefer to use the CAD standard than not. How do we use standards in AutoCAD? The hard way. All right. So firstly, we've got to decide what we'd like to draw. That's kind of a given. Then we refer to the CAD standard.

You all do this? You all go and get your CAD standard and you just have to look through it first before you start drawing? Yeah. And how many people have [INAUDIBLE] in your office who do that? I bet they all do it, yeah. Then, make sure we use the right template that's got our styles and layers set up in it. Then we select the layer we want to work on. Then we select the style we need to use. Then we navigate to the tool we need to use. Then we can start drawing.

Right, is it any wonder our users don't do this? Too many steps. They have no interest. That's why they draw everything on layer zero. "Whatever, I'll just start drawing." Yeah, so we don't want that. We don't want that. It's got to be easier than that. We've got to find a way of making this easy. Otherwise people won't use our standard. So our objective is compliance to the CAD standard.

We want people to be working efficiently and effectively. We don't want them thinking about the CAD standard. We just want them to use it. But we're busy, right? So how many people actually still have to do production work as well as managing CAD systems? Yeah? Quite a few of you. So when I was a CAD manager, I was 50% billable. So I had to bill at least 50% of my time to projects.

About 25% of time was non-bailable. That's meetings, holidays, you know, that kind of stuff. But we all know that project work takes up all available time. So I didn't bill 50%. I billed just about everything. I didn't have much time left for CAD standards. So whatever we do here had got to be easy to set up, because we don't have much time to do it. Right? So we've got to better set this up easily and quickly. It's got to be easy to deploy. We don't have a lot of time to be going around everybody's machine to set this up, so we've got to find a way of pushing out to people's machines so it can be done efficiently.

It's got to be easy to use. This is for our CAD users. It's got to be easy to use, otherwise I won't use it. Path of least resistance. If it's easier to use the standard than it is to do it the hard way, they will use the standard. But if you make it too hard, they won't do it. It's got to be easy to update. We're full of good ideas. We see stuff all the time and go "we could make this more efficient. We could save a couple of clicks. We could put a process together. We could improve, not just the standardization of our drawings, but the standardization of our method." So when we get a good idea, we want to better update the system quickly and easily. We don't want it to be a lot of hard work.

And easy to migrate. So year on year, when the new issue of AutoCAD comes out, we don't have to spend a long time testing up all our routines and programs to make sure they still function under the new system. So for me, that's why I chose tool palettes. I had tried lots of other different ways to implement stuff, and I just found tool palettes were just be easiest to set up and migrate and customize.

So we're not going to learn about today. We're not going to learn tool palette basics. So I hope you all used tool palettes a little bit before. This is about deploying tool palettes across networks. It's not about creating them. Anybody who's never used a tool palette. If you haven't used a tool palette, Matt Murphy's class is awesome. I highly recommend it. He's been giving this class for years, and a big reason is because he's very, very good. In fact, if you know tool palettes then show this to your users and get them using the tool palettes as well.

OK so what's difficult about tool palettes? Well the difficult thing about tool palettes is that tool palettes save when AutoCAD closes. So you create your tool palettes. You shut down AutoCAD. It writes out the changes. So if we just take our tool palette files and just put them on the network, what happens is-- there's my tool palettes. I've created them on the server ready to deploy. I start up AutoCAD, and AutoCAD pulls in a copy of those palette off the server. So now I've gotten in my old CAD system.

So I'm very happy with that. That's great. And it's a very small CAD department. It's just me and my colleague. But when my colleague comes to work, he opens up AutoCAD and he pulls a copy the tool palettes from the network too. So now we're working off the same set of tool pallets. This is good so far. But what happens is, I have a great idea and do some changes. And then I close AutoCAD and writes the changes back out to the server.

Awesome, this is all still good until my colleague shuts down his version of AutoCAD and writes out the old ones back off the top of my version. Well, now I'm sad. All my changes have gone. So we can't just put AutoCAD tool palettes on the server. We have to kind of work around that little bit, and that's really what this class is about is how do we put a set on the server that our users can use, but they can't mess them up.

So bit of preparation for you guys when you get back to the office. To do this effectively, you need to have firstly a graphical standard. So when I'm helping customers set this up now, I need to have a graphical standard to work with. What line weights do you want to use? Are you going to go with-- in my case, it's usually BS 8888, British standard for technical drawing. It could be PAS 1192 now, starting to be more BIM stuff. But you've got to have this graphical standard first. That's got to be somewhere. And then we also need to have, what I think of as, a data standard.

So which template files are we going to use? Where are we going to save our drawings? What about X-refs? How we can set those up? What about revisions? If I'm doing revisions to my AutoCAD drawing, do I need to archive a copy off or rename it? What's going to happen there? And then outputs. What are my outputs? Is it going to be paper? Unlike these days, people more like to be PDF, could be DWF, but I guess not. And what do I do about revising those?

So again, this is stuff that we need to have thought about before we can start. We can't automate something unless we know what we're automating, right? And also there's actually two hand outs for this class. There's the exercises we're gonna do today and there's the handout that I did to go with this is a presentation. I gave this presentation at Autodesk University a couple of years back. And I've given instructions in there on how you can open up AutoCAD tool palettes in XML editor, and then you can do some pretty cool stuff in there.

For example, if anybody's ever created a block insert block tool on the tool palette, and then you moved the original block and it's broken, well you can open up an XML editor and do a find replace on the block path and fix it. Yeah, so there's some extra bits in there you might find useful. For this lab, a couple of things we did for you before the class started. We've made sure that AutoCAD is set up to-- it's not been used before. So it should be a default install. We've also set the no logo startup switch, so you shouldn't have the splash screen start up. This is because we are going to shut down, open up AutoCAD c a few times in this class right, so we try to make it as quick as possible to open up for you.

And we opened up the dataset folder on your drive, so you should see that. And we opened up the excises, so you should have that. Good, so let's take a look at some of these exercises. So if you don't have the dataset folder open, that's where it's going to be. So there's a folder on your desktop called datasets. Within that, there's a folder called Paul Munford, and within that is the class ID. We're looking at the exercises PDF today, not the handout. That's just an extra bit of material for you if you'd like to have. You want the exercise handout open.

So there's some additional material there. And I have recorded these exercises as Screencasts. So if you want to again and review this in your own time later, you can watch these exercises back on the screencast.com site. And also I just found out this morning, I got this written down so excuse me I don't have a slide for this one, all the data sets are available at self-paced labs. So in lead 03101 on this level, there's a lab where you can go and sit down at a machine at any time in the day. It's up to you, it's self-paced. You don't have to break in or anything. And all the datasets are preloaded there for you.

So again, if you want to practice this while you're AU this week, or if you want to direct a colleague to do it, come look at this with me. You better get the excises there. So that's 3101, self-paced labs. Good. So we're going to start by just creating some folders, so I'm going to jump into the demo here. So I'll just minimize everything. If you just like to open up what will effectively be the C drive on your machine. So generally speaking, when we start this, I recommend creating a map drive on your server for your CAD stuff, and I put some instructions in the front of the handout on how to do that.

Unfortunately we couldn't do it here because of the way the machines are set up. So if you could just open up your C drive and create a new folder in your C drive. So we'll create a new folder and we'll just call it palettes. And that's where we're going to save everything for this class.

So then, if you could go to your data set-- and me just find mine. We want to copy the four folders there, build, deploy, resources, and support. We'll copy those four folders into that palettes location, into that location on your C drive. So the dataset file, is it open on your see machine? When are you guys-- [INAUDIBLE].

So you'll find the two folders they're building deploy currently empty. There's nothing in them yet. That's the ones we're going to fill up with tool palettes. Resources and support, I put some stuff in there for us that we can use as we go through. The step by step instructions are in the handout. So you might have guessed, I'm from the UK. So if anybody is struggling with my accent, or if I'm going to quickly, it's all in there.

OK so I'll go on to the next slide. Also, I've put the page that the exercise is on up in the top right of the slide there. So that should help you find that as well. OK so we're going to do a few more steps in this one. So we're gonna start by creating an admin profile. So who's worked with profiles in AutoCAD before? Quite a few. That's good, right?

So this is how we are gonna target where AutoCAD is going to work. So this is our profile, as the CAD admin. So this is going to be our set of tool palettes that we're going to be able to build. They are going to be editable. These are ones that we update. And then later on, we'll create a different profile for users now pointing towards a different set that's locked. So we're going to create the admin profile. We're going to set our support palettes up, add a default template. I'll talk about trusted locations. And we're going to tell AutoCAD where we'd like to build these TOOL palettes, and then we'll create a couple of tools.

So maybe I'll just show you the first couple of steps to begin with, and then we can pick it up from there. So we can boot up AutoCAD. My AutoCAD is still booting. Hurry, hurry. Apologies for this, folks. There's nothing like AutoCAD opening up perfectly the first time you try and then not when you really need it.

I need help from one of the lab assistants.

OK, thank you for your patience, everybody. I've got a different machine running with AutoCAD on it. So the first thing we're going to do is we're going to start by opening up the options. So the easiest way to do this is just type "options" at a command line. So if you've got a preference for the way you like to open up the options, go ahead, but I'm just going to type in "options" there. And the first thing I'm going to do is create our admin profile. So, again, you just want to maybe just watch these, and you can follow along using the handout at the moment.

So I'm going to switch over here to the other end, to my profiles tab. And in my profiles tab I'm going to choose "at list" and I'm going to create a profile here called admin. So when you get back to the office, you can call it whenever you like. But for today, call it admin. Notice that when I click "apply" and close the top of the screen there, we can see it says unnamed profile still. So although I've created an admin profile, it's not yet current. So we do want to make sure that we select the admin profile and choose "set current." Now we'll see at the top of the dialog, now we see the admin is written there.

So now we know the admin profile is the current profile. Anything we do now is going to be saved against the admin profile. So keep with me. I'll do a couple of more steps. This is all written in the handout, so you should be able to follow along. So once I've got my profile created, I'm going to switch to the files tab, and I'm going to do a few changes in here. We're going to set a few support paths. So the first thing I want to change is in my support path. I want to add those two folders I created. My support folder, which has got things like templates, my CAD standard in, and my resources folder. The two folders where I keep resources, is where I keep scripts, and in macros, and all that kind of stuff.

So to add a path here to the support paths, I'll just click over here on the left "add," then it asks us where the path is. You can copy them paste the path in here, but I'm going to pick on "browse," and browse to this new folder, which I now have to create because I did that step on the other machine.

Why can't I create a new folder? Is anybody having this problem as well? I've created it, I just can't spell. All right, got there.

Yep, so back in AutoCAD I'm going to browse to my local drive, my C drive, find that palettes folder we created, and I'm going to add my resources folder. So I'll click on OK right here, and then I'll do exactly the same thing again. So add. This time I'm going to click "browse," browse back to my C drive, palettes folder, and this, I'm going to add my support folder in there. So maybe you guys want to get to that step. Create your admin profile. Make sure you set it current. Then come back to your support, and set up those two folders in support And while you're doing that, I'll just give one more tip. If you like, you can click on the move up, and you can move these extra folders you've added to your support paths to the top of the screen. And that just means that AutoCAD is going to search these locations first. So go ahead and do those steps, if you haven't done them already. And then I'll give you an extra couple of steps in a moment.

How are we doing? Everybody with me so far? Anybody not manage any of that? OK, so if I could have your attention again-- so working our way down these support paths, the next one I'm going to come to is the trusted locations. So who's used this trusted locations path before? Yeah? Small number of you. So this is relatively new. It's been added to AutoCAD in the last release or two, and it's been put there as an extra security measure.

So what they're saying is-- if you're running your own programs, your own scripts, list routines, VBA macros, whatever you've got-- it needs to be run from a trusted location, otherwise AutoCAD will pop up like a splash screen all the time saying, do you want to run this program or not. So we can add a trusted location in there. So I'm going to click Add and Browse again. We're going to browse back to the C drive palettes folder. And we want to add our support folder to the trusted locations. So the support folder's where we've got some macros, which we're going to run later.

So I click OK there. Click Continue. And that's added that on. So trusted locations are something we'll set up. Now the whole point of this set up is that, because we are using our tool palettes to drive standards. We don't need to have a template file that's got all the styles and standards in THEM because our tool palettes remember the standard. So when we use a tool palette tool, the standard is created. So we can use a template which is completely blank. And what's nice about that is we don't end up with a lot of extra crud in our drawings that we don't really want to be there, because we know that everybody should delete that stuff on the template, but they never do.

So let's start with a completely blank template. So for the template, I'm going to select say where it says default template for [INAUDIBLE]. So this is the default template. It's used whenever you click on the New button. And we're going to click on Browse there, and we get to add in from our C drive palettes folder from our resources folder. I put a copy in there of aCAD.iso, because I'm European so it's an ISO standard aCAD. aCAD.dwt. So if you could pick on open there, that just sets that as being the default template. So you can have your own default template. Set it in whatever units you like.

How are we doing? Everybody with me so far? OK so next up is the absolute key one. This is the one that we all came for. We're looking here at tool palette file location. So this is where AutoCAD, by default, is loading in tool palettes. These are the default tool palettes that come with AutoCAD, but we don't want to use the default ones. We want to use our own ones. And this is a tip I actually picked up in Matt Murphy's class.

What you can do here is we're just going to get rid of this location. We're going to put our own location in. And we don't to worry about the fact it's not pointing at any tool palette files right now. When we close down AutoCAD, it will create the tool palettes in that location, which is pretty cool. So get a brand new blank set of tool palettes that we can build.

So what I'm going to do is I'm just going to click Remove to remove the standard path, and I'm going to click and browse to C drive, palettes, build, right? So our build folder is where we're going to build our set of tool palettes. That's all working folder for us CAD Admins. We're going to add that as our tool palette file location. So while you're doing that step, you can go ahead and do that couple of steps, I'll just mention a little tip there. You can have multiple tool pilot locations. So you could keep the existing tool palettes, if you felt like it.

But AutoCAD will write its tool palettes to the first location in the list. Yeah? So different profiles, you can have them in different orders. You can have multiple sets of palettes. You could have a mechanical engineering set of palettes, a Civil engineering set of palettes, an architectural set of palettes, and have them all in that folder there, in that one location.

Let me just check over here. Yep, everybody with me? Good. So that's our support path set for the time being. So we can pick OK there. I'm just going to close the options down. And now let's create a tool palette. So I'm just going to open up the tool palette so I can see them. So I'll just type in "palettes." And that's going to open up out tool palettes right here. So maybe I'll just scrunch these down a little bit.

One tip with tool palettes, I don't know if you've noticed, but if you don't want them to dock, hold down the Control key and they won't dock to the sides there. OK so I'm going to rename this palette. I'm going to call this one "CAD standards." No, I'm sorry. I'm going to call this one "draw." That's what I decided to do. So once you created a pallet and renamed it, we'll put a tool on it. And then we're gonna close down AutoCAD, and we're going to see what happens when we write out these changes.

So to create a tool, if you could open up, from our resources folder from our support folder-- oh no, from our resources folder there should be a DWT file in here called global template. Every time I hit right click, it shuts. Right, so I'll just show you there. So if you could open up this file here, from your palettes folder resources, called global template. So I do start with a global template, and in my global template I've defined all my layers, and all my styles, and all my texts, and everything I need. We're just not going to use that as a template to start drawing, because we don't want to have all this stuff in our drawing.

So I'll open this up. And if you guys could zoom in. And from the ISO Standard line definitions over here, we're just going to create a tool. Who's never created a tool palettes tool before? Wow, it's like one of you-- yeah perfect, right. So you're up to speed with that. So yeah, we're just going to pick this layer call "visible." So I'm just going to select this line with a left click, and I'm going to right click and just drag it onto my palette.

So it's just a sample tool we're going to create, just so we can see what happens when we write these out. Let's rename this tool. So once you've created a tool, I'm going to right click and choose Properties. I'm just gonna name this "visible lines." Draws lines on the visible layer. So how many people take the time to put a little description of their tool when they create tool palette buttons? I think the chap down here needs some help.

So you've notice that, when you change the description, your description becomes a tool tip. So again, you can improve your standard, use of standards, by giving people tool tips. When they hover over the button, they see what that button does. The class is being recorded, so you better watch the class back next week. And all the handouts are uploaded to the web site. Yes you better download the handout and the data. Great. Everybody with me?

So when we're done, we want to close down AutoCAD. so I'm going to close the global template file. I don't have to save any changes, and then we'll close AutoCAD. And I'm expecting to see my tool palettes, so where are they? Oh yeah, hit C, palettes, build. Good. So what we should expect to see, in that location we set for our two pilot offering-- So we set on our C drive, we had a folder called palettes, and in there we had a folder called build. We should now see we've got a folder created called palettes. And this thing here call the ACTP catalog .ACT file. Does everybody see that OK?

Right, so I've put a description in that longer form handout with exactly what the catalog file is doing and some extra things you can do. You can open up this XML file, and you can take a look at what's going on inside it. But we're not going to do that exercise today, because we couldn't get an XML reader. But if you double click into the palettes folder, you should see another ATC file. This one will be called "draw," because that's what we named our palette.

And then I'll have a big long GUID, which is a Global Unique Identifier, after it, which we don't need to worry about. So if these steps happened, we're good. Is everybody okay with that? Anybody not see that happen? Fantastic. So we've written out the changes. Let's boot AutoCAD back up again, and we'll add some more stuff to the palettes.

Fantastic. Everybody with me? Yes, good. So we've learned that we can set the support paths up or we can write our own set of palettes to our own folder. So let's just create another couple of palettes here. So I'm just going to right-click over here. Where's my mouse gone? Right click anywhere on the palette and choose New Palette. So I'm going to create one here called CAD standards. I'll create another one here called library. Now the order these palettes will be seen in is set up in your profile. That's one of the reasons we're deploying it via profile.

So if you're very keen that these patents should appear in this order exactly, then you'll need to deploy them via profile. You don't need to deploy these palettes via profile, but if you do then, when we create copy of the app in profile for the user, the user's going to see exactly what we see right here. So if did want them to come in a different order, reorder them now before we write them out again. Just make sure they're in the correct order for you.

OK so we're going to do next is we going to create a little tool to run a macro. So this time, instead of clicking and dragging a tool from our standard, we're going to create a tool from an existing AutoCAD command. So the command we're going to use the script command, and to find that we're just going to right-click somewhere here over the palette. And we're looking for customized commands. Who's used this workflow before, customized commands? What we should see, we should see this open up a little mini version of the CUI, with a whole big long list of commands that we could add to our palettes.

So what got me really excited about this is we don't just standardize buttons that allow us to create geometry. We can standardize the order in which we want people to work. So I created a bunch of tools for surveying, in which we had our surveying tools in the correct order, to remind people when you do surveying, I want you to put grids down, I want you to draw the drawings, I want you to do annotations, I want you to make notes. We had a separate set of palettes for CNC work. Again, given the correct tools in the correct order I wanted people to use them.

So it's not just the output we can standardize, it's the method. OK so I'm going to search in here for the command I'm looking for. I'm looking for the script command. I have to learn I can't speak and type at the same time. Right. So it's right here, run script. So now it's going to click and drag run script onto my tool palette, and then we can close down the custom user interface. OK. So we have just a standard button. Just going to run a script. OK, you can do that bit if you haven't had a go already.

Yeah so do you just want to just create that one button for me. And then I'll show what to do next. You're not diving machine, so I guess you are up to speed, good. So what we'll do next is we're just going to edit the script to run a little macro that's just going to open up our CAD standard. So right click and choose Properties. I'm going to give it a name, CAD standard. Under description I'm going to say, "opens the CAD standard in your browser." And then down here, where it says Command String. Let me make that a bit bigger so you can see it.

So the command string is a sequence of commands that AutoCAD is going to run when we click on this button. So currently, the command stream just says script. Well let's delete that out of there. And you might find it easy just to copy and paste this in off the handout. So if I catch up, find us on the right page There's a little one line macro in here. OK, so we're looking for this line here on page 19. So if you just want to copy that entire line into the command string. So I'm going to jump back here into AutoCAD and paste that in.

So he's used these kind of macros before? Couple of people. So what does the "carrot C carrot C" a the beginning mean? Dos anyone know? Cancel, cancel, it's equivalent to pressing the escape key twice. So it's going to cancel out any commands that are currently running. Does anybody know what the underscore means? The underscore is localization, right? This is saying, use the standard English version of this command. So this macro would still work if it was an AutoCAD product that had language pack installed. The secret full stop after that. Does anybody know what the secret full stop does? Don't tell your users what the secret full stop does.

The secret full stop will run this command even if it's been undefined. So you can undefined commands in AutoCAD, which means people can't use them. But if you put a full stop in front of it, it will run anyway. So that's an extra tip. You'll see that, and Robert Green does a great class showing you how to get rid of commands you don't want people to use. The command browsers is gonna open up your default internet browser, whatever browser is in the machine. And then we're parsing that command to path, and the path goes to our resources folder, and it's going to open up a PDF called CAD standards.

OK one last tip. We can make the button image look a bit more interesting. So instead of this script image, we're just going to right click over the image and say Specify Image. And included an image for you in the data set. So you can click Specify Image and then browse out again to the C drive, palettes, resources, and I've put a PNG file in here called CAD standard. So we can use this as the image for both the light and the dark theme.

So I'm going to pick Open, and then I will do it again for the dark theme image, pick the same CAD standard icon, and pick Open again. And when we're done, we can pick OK, and that should apply that image to this button. So it's fairly straightforward to create your own button images and have something a bit more intuitive for your users take a look at. So when we're done, we can pick OK, and we'll test it. So let's see what happens. Woo, it work.

So your users have no excuse. Did you read the CAD standard? It's there, you just press the button. There it is, no excuses. Yeah, so we can use tool palettes to standardize our output, we can use it to standardized the method, and we can give people descriptions of exactly what they should be doing. OK so have a go at that if you haven't had a go already. I'll give everybody a minute just to catch up.

Is everybody up to speed? Does anybody need some help? All good? Good, well done. OK, at this point, I did say we'll close AutoCAD to write out change and see what happens, but we're running a little bit behind. So I think I'll wait till the next section, and then we'll close AutoCAD and see what happens. But for the time being, I want to move on to the next bit. So who here uses the action recorder tool? I think the action recorder tool is very useful for CAD managers, because you don't have to get into heavy scripting and lisps to be be able to put together commands that people use the whole time. If you want to put two or three commands together, save people a few clicks if they're doing the same two or three things all the time, the macro recorder is a much easier way of doing it than having to work out the correct macro to write or script to write.

So there's a little bit a set up we need to do here. We need to start by going back to the options. So I'm going to pull up my options again. And we are looking for the action recorder settings, action recording file location. So this is currently set to your local drive, so we want to put this one on the server as well. So when we create action recorder programs, they'll be written out to the server, and then anybody else can use them at same time.

So as we did before, I'm going to click right here, and I'm going to choose Remove. I'm going to remove the standard file. Standard file location is pointing at my local drive. And I click Browse, and point this out to our same C drive, palettes. And I'm going to point it to my support folder, which is where I put all my customizations. Yeah, so when we create our command macros, they're going to be pointed here. Our action recorder macros. Yes, everybody with me?