90 AutoCAD Tips in 90 Minutes

Lynn Allen – Autodesk, Inc.

AU-314-3 If you want a plethora of power user tips, then be sure join Cadalyst columnist Lynn Allen as
she takes you through a whirlwind of productivity techniques that are certain to improve your everyday
drawing life. At a tip a minute, you’re certain to discover some AutoCAD features that will remove some of the
tedium and boost your ability to meet project deadlines. Be sure to hold on

About the Speaker:

Lynn is the worldwide technical evangelist for Autodesk. She is an AutoCAD expert, with almost 20 years of
experience dating back to Release 1. 4. Lynn taught at the corporate and collegiate level for 13 years before
joining Autodesk and is a columnist for Cadalyst magazine for the past 15 years. In addition to her many
achievements, Lynn has written several books, the latest being AutoCAD Tips and Techniques for
Professionals. A sought-after public speaker with a unique comedic style, Lynn is always one of the highest-
rated speakers at Autodesk University.

lynn.allen@autodesk.com
 90 AutoCAD Tips in 90 Minutes

Introduction
With so much going on in our everyday drawing life we have a tendency to get in an AutoCAD
rut. The goal behind this course is to show you a variety of tips that will spark a new
awareness and lead you down the road to increased productivity!

User Interface Tips:

1) Workspaces
Use workspaces to save snapshots of the user interface

Note: Turning on “Automatically save workspace

changes” can potentially cause AutoCAD to close slowly.

2) AutoComplete (Tab to cycle)

Use the tab key at the command line to cycle through all of the command and system
variable combinations

3) Arrow to move up and down command list.

Up and down arrows can take you through previously executed commands.

4) Control+9 to toggle command line on/off.

5) Right Click on the command line to retrieve previous commands from the shortcut menu.

6) Move Model space/Layout tabs

Move to and from the status bar via the right click “Hide Layout/Model tabs” option.

7) Easy Move and Copy of Layout Tabs

Use Control key to copy layout tabs, simply drag to move them.

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8) Drag and Drop layout tabs to Sheet Set

After saving your drawing you can easily drag and drop your layout tabs to the active sheet
set.

9) Right Click on Status Bar toggles to quickly change the settings.

10) Status Bar and Tray customization

Set up your status bar for maximum productivity. Right click on any tool and select
“Display”

11) Maximizing Viewports

Double click on a viewport to open and edit the contents as though you were in model
space. No need to worry about accidentally modifying the scale factor and yet zoom and
pan all you want. Click outside of the red area to quickly get back to your paperspace
layout.

12) SCALELISTEDIT

Edit the viewport scale factors and remove those you

don’t intend on using. Not only will this speed up
AutoCAD but it will make it easier for you to select
the right scale factor.
Anchored Palettes
Anchor your palettes to the left or right of the screen
for maximum productivity. Take advantage of their
roll-up capabilities

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 90 AutoCAD Tips in 90 Minutes

13) Clean Screen (or Ctrl 0)

Rid your display of clutter (except for the menu bar, status bar and quick access toolbar).
Great for client presentations

14) Taskbar to 1
Display all open files at the taskbar by setting the system variable TASKBAR to 1.

15) Customize the Quick Access Toolbar for maximum productivity! (Layer drop-down,
SAVEAS)

16) Lock Toolbars, Palettes and Panels

Tired of toolbars moving accidentally – lock them down!

17) Minimize the ribbon for maximum screen space

Click on the arrow to minimize the ribbon.

Tool Palette Tips:

18) Quickly create a Tool Palette of your blocks in Design Center

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 90 AutoCAD Tips in 90 Minutes

19) Drag and Drop blocks to your Tool Palette

Highlight a block and use a right click to drag a block to an open tool palette. Your new tool
with also remember the layer, rotation angle, scale, etc.

20) Drag and Drop Hatch patterns to your Tool Palette

Highlight a hatch pattern and use a right click to drag the hatch pattern to the tool palette.
The pattern, layer, scale factor, and rotation angle are also saved with the hatch pattern.

21) Set up tools to automatically scale to your drawing

22) Drag and Drop a dimension to save all the settings and
the layer for speedy additions of new dimensions with
the same settings.

23) Easily customize your icon with an existing image file.

Layer Tips:

24)Customize your Layer Columns

For maximum productivity be sure to turn off any

columns you aren’t using.

25)Freeze Columns
Use the Freeze Column option from the right
click menu to keep a column from scrolling

26) Layer properties per viewport

Using these three columns in the Layer dialog you can assign layer properties PER viewport.

27) Deactivate the Status Column to save time

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 90 AutoCAD Tips in 90 Minutes

28) Layer States for maximum productivity

AutoCAD gurus use Layers States so they can avoid constantly changing the layer settings.

29) Applying Layer States per Viewport

After setting up your Layer States you can apply them to individual viewports.

30) SETBYLAYER command

This is a fantastic command to set any object (including those within nested blocks) back to
BYLAYER!

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Misc. Layer Tips:

31) Layer Translater (LAYTRANS)
 Great for mapping layers from one naming convention to another

32) LAYWALK (View layers individually)

Use the LAYWALK command to quickly view individual layers

33) LAYDEL (Delete even the most stubborn layers!)

Use this fantastic Express Tool to delete any layer (except for 0 and defpoints)

34) LAYISO – Isolates layer(s) for easy editing. AutoCAD 2008 and above allows you to fade
the other layers so you can see the objects on the other layers but not accidentally modify
them.

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 90 AutoCAD Tips in 90 Minutes

35) Autodesk Seek

Use the DC Online tab in Design Center to easily get to the content on Autodesk Seek (or
just select the Autodesk Seek button in AutoCAD 2010)
Autodesk Seek
www.autodesk.com/seek

9 © 2005 Autodesk

TIMESAVERS:

36) JOIN command (Glue)

Use the Join command to glue together polylines, lines, arcs, elliptical arcs and splines. Join
two lines together that are collinear, even if there are gaps between them. Join different
types of objects together if there are no gaps. Join more than one arc, even with gaps, as
long as they lie in the same imaginary circle.
You can even use the JOIN command to turn an arc into a circle.

37) OVERKILL
This Express tool is a great way to delete duplicate objects and clean up your drawing.
OVERKILL removes unneeded objects by deleting duplicates and combining line and arc
segments that overlap. There are multiple settings to ensure you get just the results you
want.

38) JPGOUT, BMPOUT, PNGOUT, TIFOUT

These nifty commands commands make it easy for you to turn your drawings into graphics

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 90 AutoCAD Tips in 90 Minutes

files.

39) Print to a graphics file via the Plotting Wizard

Use the Add-a-plotter Wizard to have great control over creating a graphics file.

Select “Edit Plotter Configuration” to control the resolution.

40) CHANGE command to shorten/lengthen

Use the age-old CHANGE command to quickly lengthen/shorten line segments to a specific
point (Ortho on)

41) Highlight objects and use a right click to Move and Copy

42) Speedy Array (Control key)

Select objects, select a grip, C for Copy and hold the Control key down to do a quickie
array!

43) Shift to turn Ortho ON

Any time you want to temporarily toggle the Ortho on/off you can do so by holding down
the Shift key

44) Speedy Trims/Extends

Hit an extra enter to turn the entire drawing into a cutting edge (objects don’t highlight
though!)

45) Fast Corners using Shift in FILLET command

Use the Shift option in the FILLET command to quickly square off corners.

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 90 AutoCAD Tips in 90 Minutes

46) FILTERS command

Go directly to the undocumented FILTERS command to quickly delete excess layer filters.

System Variables:

47)PEDITACCEPT
Set PEDITACCEPT to 1 to avoid the irritating “Do you want to turn it into a polyline”
question.

48) IMAGEFRAME (set to 2) DWFFRAME, PDFFRAME, OLEFRAME, XCLIPFRAME and

DGNFRAME (or FRAME in AutoCAD 2010)

When set to a value of 2, these commands display the frames but do not plot them.
Note: FRAME set to 3 indicates varied settings and no override

49) OSNAPZ to replace Z Value with Current Elevation

When snapping to objects with different elevations, you may want the current elevation to
be used for the Z value. Set OSNAPZ to 1.

50) PLINEGEN - Sets how linetype patterns generate around the vertices of a 2D polyline.

51) WHIPARC to 1 for smooth arcs and circles (forget dealing with VIEWRES!)

52) Set HATCHGAP to a value other than 0 so you don’t have to search for holes in your
hatching.

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Attribute Tips:

53) ATTDIA to display dialog box for attributes

If you prefer a dialog box when inserting blocks with attributes set ATTDIA to 1.

54) ATTMODE to display all visible and invisible attributes

Set the system variable ATTMODE to 0 to make all the attributes in your drawing invisible.
To display them as originally created set to 0 and to turn them all on regardless of their
settings set ATTMODE to 2.

55) ATTREQ – Suppresses the attribute prompts and uses the defaults
When you are in a rush and want to use the defaults for your attributes you can set
ATTREQ to 0.

56) Move locked attributes with –ATTEDIT

57) BURST – Explode blocks without losing their assigned attribute values.

OPTIONS Tips:

58) Default Template File for QNEW

Use the Files tab to set a default template file for starting new drawings. This will eliminate
you needing to select a template file each time (use the NEW command if you want to
select a different template file).

59) QTEXTMODE – to speed up drawings with lots of text

Turning on QuickText will convert your text to rectangles (Display Tab)

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 90 AutoCAD Tips in 90 Minutes

60) Hidden Messages

Turn those hidden message back on in the System tab in OPTIONS.

61) Right Click Customization

Configure your right mouse button to do BOTH a shortcut menu and an enter in OPTIONS
(user preferences tab)

62) Speed up your Annotative Scaling

Turn off “Maintain Visual Fidelity” while you are drawing. Turn it back on right before
saving to a lower release number.

63) ISAVEPERCENT - the higher the number (100 max) the faster your saves!)

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 90 AutoCAD Tips in 90 Minutes

TEXT Tips:
64) Easy Copy and Paste from WORD
Copy the text to the clipboard, drop it into the MTEXT Editor.

65) Control the Text Sample string with MTJIGSTRING

66) Two fast means of exiting the MTEXT Editor:

Click outside of the dialog box or Control+Enter

67) Automatic Columns in MTEXT

68) TEXTTOFRONT command

Bring all of the text to the top of the draworder with the TEXTTOFRONT command.

69) Creating multiple lines of single line text (DTEXTED set to 2)

Picking in other locations throughout the drawing while in DTEXT makes it easy to create
many single text strings at one time.

70) Use FONTMAP to map a complex font to a simple font.

example: romans.shx;arial.ttf

Table Tips:

71) AutoFill AutoCAD Tables

Use AutoFill to do automatic numbering in Tables.

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 90 AutoCAD Tips in 90 Minutes

72) Tables wrap automatically over multiple columns (as long as Table Breaks are enabled…)

73) Hard Enter (linefeed) with Alt+Enter inside of

a table cell

Misc. Tips:

74) Get the Dimscale value quickly in Properties (under Fit)

75) Customize Quick Properties to display DIMSCALE

Set up QP so a simple click will show you the DIMSCALE for a dimension.

76) Create smaller PDFs with DWF

Create a DWF file out of your drawing first…then create a PDF. Files will be half the size!

77) Inverse XCLIP and dynamic grips

Use grips on clipped XREFs to dynamically change the clipping and to invert the XCLIP.

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 90 AutoCAD Tips in 90 Minutes

78) Fade External References

79) Use OSNAP Tracking to quickly find the center of a box

(in fact – use Object Snap Tracking to make your life much better period!)

Keys, Keys, Keys

80) Control+R to cycle through all of your viewports

81) Control+A to select all the objects in your drawing

82) Shift+Spacebar to select stacked objects

83) Tab to cycle through object snaps

84) Navigate through layouts with Control+PageUp and Control+PageDown

85) Hold down right mouse button to clear grips

86) Shift for more than one hot grip

87) Control+Tab to cycle through open drawings

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 90 AutoCAD Tips in 90 Minutes

Dimensioning Tips:
88) QDIM
This fantastic underused command can help you knock out dimensions in no time

89) DIMBREAK
Your drafting instructor warned you about the dreaded crossing
dimension lines didn't he!

We go to great length to break our dimensions to avoid such a

travesty. We end up exploding the dimension (bad, bad, bad!), and
then breaking it manually. DIMBREAK to the rescue!

The process is simple. You select the dimension that you want to break and then the
dimension(s) that are on top of that dimension. AutoCAD does the rest for you!

90) DIMSPACE to evenly space baseline dimensions

Use the friendly DIMSPACE command to correct baseline dimensions which are not equally
separated.

91) DIMSPACE to even out continuous dimensions

You can also use DIMSPACE to correct continuous dimensions that don’t line up!

92) DIMTMOVE
0 Moves the dimension line with dimension text
1 Adds a leader when dimension text is moved
2 Allows text to be moved freely without a leader

Almost there!

93) SELECTIONANNODISPLAY to 0 that magically turns off ghosting with annotative objects

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 90 AutoCAD Tips in 90 Minutes

94) Set INDEXCTL to 3 if you work with an excess of clipped xrefs (or XREFs in viewports)to
speed things up. This turns on layer and spatial indexes. AutoCAD will read in only the
objects that are inside the clipped area (or inside a viewport).

95) FILTER command for serious object filtering!

96) Missing dialog boxes Alt+spacebar

Key in the command that is invisible, then hit Alt+spacebar plus “enter” to get the dialog
box on your cursor. You should be able to retrieve it at this point. If not – use the arrow
keys to drag it into sight (usually left arrow key).

97) IMAGEQUALITY – set to Draft for faster loading images (back to High to print)

98) Use Autodesk Design Review to compare two different drawings.

www.autodesk.com/designreview

99) Visit my blog: www.autodesk.com/lynnallen to get your questions answered.

100) Go to Autodesk University 2010!

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