Having used AutoCAD almost my entire professional live and working alongside those who use it as well, I find it amazing how, with so much in common, we’re so different in our approaches. Let’s look at two camps. One camp is the people like me. I love customizing AutoCAD and extending its capabilities, mainly by programming in AutoLISP. Another camp wants none of that; they want to be designers, not programmers.
I think they’re missing out on the ability to automate repetitive tasks (something any AutoCAD camper has in common). There’s good news for you if you’re not a programmer and don’t want to be.
AutoCAD has a tool that can record your actions (repetitive tasks!) and put them into a named macro that you can play back at any time. Accordingly, it’s called Action Recorder, which you can find in its own panel in the Manage tab of the Ribbon.
Today’s post is intended to provide a general overview of Action Recorder. It’s easy to use, and plenty of instructional guides, including the Help file, are available.
Getting Started With Action Recorder
Let’s start with all those icons in the ribbon panel. Of course, there’s the big Record button on the left. If you press it, it turns into a Stop button. That makes sense. There are three icons vertically next to it (in the image, they’re grayed out since no macro is selected). The top icon lets you insert a message into the current macro. Think user prompts… “Select Object:” “Enter Distance:” and things like that.
The middle icon pauses the macro to insert a base point used by the proceeding coordinate entry/value. The bottom icon allows the user to insert a pause for user input during the macro’s playback.
Now for the right side of the panel. There’s a pulldown that contains all your available action macros. Above that is the play button. It’s pretty easy so far. Pick a macro and play it.
To the immediate right of Play is the Preferences icon, which displays a dialog where you can control some of the panel’s display options. Finally, the icon on the right will display the Action Macro Manager. These last two dialogs are shown below:
Recording Your Action Macro
Let’s quickly explore what happens when you decide to record a macro. First, a couple of “gotchas.” Avoid dialog boxes and use the command line version if possible. For instance, the “My_Layers” macro shown in my list uses the -LAYER command. Most commands that use dialog boxes have a similar command line version.
Another thing to avoid are grips. The My_Door_Block macro inserts a dynamic block and changes its default Visibility State and vertical Flip. Typically, you’d do this using the block’s multifunctional grips, but the recorder won’t pick that up. Instead, I used the Properties Palette to make those changes.
Back to recording. You’ll only notice that the round Record button transforms into a square Stop button, a circular red badge will appear next to your cursor, and the additional tools menu will expand and pin itself in place to display the Action Tree. More on that in a moment.
When done, click the stop button. You’ll get a dialog prompting you to name your new Action Macro (did you click Stop because you made a mistake? Just use Cancel here to delete it). Please be aware here that the name must not have any spaces. I like to use underscores in their place. You do you, please.
Also, notice that there is a folder path. This is where your action macro file is stored. For years, these files used an extension of ACTM. It is now an ACTMX file. It’s just something to be aware of. The really cool thing is that your macros can be shared. You can send one to a colleague, and they can put it into the default file location, a custom location, or better yet, you can define a path to a shared location so the entire team can access this new tool.
So, now you’ve created time-saving customizations. You’re still not a programmer, but you are now the office hero. It doesn’t get much better than that.
Back to the Action Tree shown in the Additional Tools menu. This is a list of the actions you used to create your macro. By right-clicking on an entry, you can access a few tools. You can insert a message or pause for input (same as the icons we saw in the panel), or if you select something editable, you can do so here. In the example below, we might need to change the circle’s radius to something other than 8.000.
Wrapping It Up
Action Recorder can be just the tool you need to get your tedious task down to a single pick-and-click. And, as you’ve seen, sharing it with your team is easy, too.
So, you can quickly create powerful macros to improve your efficiency, all without having to learn a programming language, which should turn you into a happy AutoCAD camper!
More Tuesday Tips
Check out our whole Tuesday Tips series for ideas on how to make AutoCAD work for you.
