Autodesk University | AutoCAD Secrets Exposed

PRESENTER: OK, can you hear me?

AUDIENCE: Yeah.

PRESENTER: Is it that time? So how was everybody's first day at AU yesterday? Good?

AUDIENCE: Yeah.

PRESENTER: Good?

AUDIENCE: Good.

PRESENTER: All right. I require noise. All right. And I love it when the room is divided into two because I
don't know what's a good tip or a bad tip, so if you see something that you didn't know,

feedback is helpful.

So you guys will be the oohs and you'll be the ahhs.

AUDIENCE: Ahh.

PRESENTER: All right. Do we need to practice that?

AUDIENCE: Yes.

[LAUGHTER]

AUDIENCE: Ooh.

PRESENTER: All right.

AUDIENCE: Ahh.

PRESENTER: All right. All right. So give me feedback. Let me know what's a good tip. Because I need to

know what to do next time. Right.

Now, how many of you were here last year? Anybody in the class last year? Oh, quite a few of

you.

Well, thank you for coming back. The good news is I think I have one repeated tip. All the rest
 are different. All right.

AUDIENCE: Ahh.

AUDIENCE: Ooh.

AUDIENCE: Ahh.

[LAUGHTER]

PRESENTER: And this class, most of it is older tips, just a few are the newer ones. Because you've got lots of

classes that teach you the new tips. Right. So I want to know the stuff that if you'd known, you
could have done it 10 years ago. You could have been doing it all along. Right.

Because when I learn something new the first thing I do is go, so how long could I have been
doing that? Right. And I did learn two new tips this year. So I was excited.

When you've been doing it for 30 years, a tip is pretty exciting. All right. OK. So if you don't

know who I am, my name's Jeanne Aarhus. And I'm very happy to be here because for me, 50

degrees is exceedingly warm because I'm from Nebraska and it's 31 there this morning. At

least it's going to get above freezing for the first time in five days. All right.

You can read all that later. But that's about me. I teach and train and consult in both Autodesk
and Bentley products. So that's how I earn my living, I work for me. So when I don't like my

boss, it's really difficult to reprimand them. OK.

You guys already read that or you wouldn't be here. So my goal today is that you will walk

away with at least five new tips that you didn't know that you can use regularly. All right. So

hopefully I'll get through all 50. But I always put extra tips in there because I never know how
fast I'll talk.

Those of you who have been in my class know I can talk really fast. Right. Good news is it's

being recorded. So you can go back and play it again when you forgot what I said. Because

believe me by Thursday, the brain cells you have today will have died. All right.

So you go back and you watch it again. And then you can remember. All right. OK. So let's find

out what we can do. That's all I do with PowerPoint, sorry. I'm not a PowerPoint person. I like

to do it live.
Oops. That was the wrong button to push. There we go. All right. Wake up the computer.

So for those of you who are online, this class is being recorded and being broadcast live. So

welcome to everybody who's online. And, again, this is just a collection of tips. And download

the handout, there is a handout with step-by-step instructions on how to do some of this. So

you don't have to take a bunch of notes today. All right. Yes.

[LAUGHTER]

I know what it's like. About next Wednesday, you're going to be like, oh, what was that I

thought was so cool and I've forgotten? OK. So the first thing, I've got a bunch of files here.

We'll be jumping back and forth.

MTEXT, we all have to use MTEXT. All right. And of course, everybody knows you can double
click and edit. But there's a couple of things that I like to point out that sometimes are buried in

the upgrades that you may not have run into. So I'm going to right click and go to Columns.

And we all know we have Columns.

If you use the Dynamic Columns and the Auto Height, I want to go ahead and show you a

couple things that you can control. So first of all, if you look at this-- oops, double click. There's
a little icon right down here that you can use to separate that.

Did I not turn that on? Columns, Dynamic, Auto Height. There we go. It's not set to 2,

obviously. Come on. Don't you love it when the first tip doesn't work right?

That really is no good. There's another setting, that should have worked. There we go. OK.
Don't know why it didn't work the first time. But when you go ahead and you move this around,

all right, and then by default, you don't have any control initially over what the spacing is

between the columns. But how you control that is if you just use the arrow over here to control

your paragraph width, that's how you can change what the spacing is between the column.

And then when you wrap it, it will maintain the distance that you specified. All right. So you

have to use this little button right here. Everybody tries to always use this one. That doesn't
really work for what you want. All right. Not major, but if you've not run into it. OK.

Text Frames. Now, this one is actually a new tip in 2016. How many of you are in 2016? Oh,
that's impressive. OK. So in 2016, you have a new frame that you can put around your text. So

if I select this piece of text and I go to Properties, you will see that right here you have a Text
Frame option in your Properties now, where you could turn it on.

And the secret is how do you control the spacing between the text and the frame? Well, if you
go ahead and Edit this and you right click and go to Background Mask, even though I'm not

using the mask, this is your spacing. All right. So if I change that to a 1-- oops, not 10, 1. And
then I won't actually use it. I'll turn it off.

That still is what it actually uses. So here you can see some of the examples that I did, where

I've got 1.5 and 2. Now if you're not in 2016 and you're in any of the previous versions, I want
to show you my tip that I used to use for box text that was dynamic. So that when you modify
it, it grows and shrinks with you. This is actually a leader.

So what you need to do is you need to make a leader type with no leader. All right. That's the

trick. You got to figure out how to misuse and abuse AutoCAD. Right. So if you look at this, I'll
go ahead and show you what my leader looks like, the style.

You come up here. I have a standard boxed leader. And, yes, it should be annotative, by the
way. If you come in here, I don't have anything turned on here. There's no leader points. All

right. But one of the things that you do need to do is you need to come in and you need to
specify your arrowhead size.

And the reason you have to do this-- I'll show you in a minute-- you also need to be able to
specify your landing distance and a couple of those other settings because they control things

that you'll do with it later in some of the spacing. All right. And, yes, it should be annotative.

So then if that's my current text size, when I use my leader command, it actually lets me draw
the box with no leader. And you just type in your text. All right. And it automatically has a box

around it.

And if you want to modify it, it'll adjust accordingly. Now, the reason I like to have those other

settings defined is it can be kind of nice to select it and right click and add a leader down the
road if I need to. So it's nice if those settings are actually defined. Right.

If you ever need to. But you don't have to have a leader defined on a leader. Just use the text
settings. OK. And all the instructions on how to do that are all in the handout. OK.

Superscript. Everybody knows how to do the typical superscript, right? Because now it's in the

MTEXT editor. Is everybody using MTEXT now more than DTEXT? That didn't sound very
 good.

AUDIENCE: Yes.

PRESENTER: OK. Because MTEXT is actually pretty functional now. If you double click on this, everybody I
hope knows that you can just highlight this and you can hit Superscript or Subscript. Right. I

think that part's obvious. All right.

What's not necessarily obvious is how you can do some of this other subscripting and

superscript. So here, this is how-- and you can do these for years. This has been there for
years. You just had to know the trick.

If you take text that looks like this, Top/Bottom, and you double click that and you make that
into a fraction, what the slash will do-- so I"m going to come up here and I'm going to stack the

fraction-- is it will actually give you text in the fraction. So I used to work with utilities. We had a
lot of text that were fractions, not numbers that were fractions.

You can also do this one if you do the same thing and you stack it, it'll give you the diagonal

fraction with text. And then these here if you select this, these are more like the old way of
doing the superscript and subscript. That one will allow you to, with the up carrot there, will
allow you to just make it a stacked fraction with no line. And then right here, again, I would do

this one different.

You could highlight just that portion and stack it. And that would give you the subscript. But
now these two down here are actually easier just to use the buttons that are up here at the

top. Make sense? All right. These three here are the ones that most people don't know they
can do. OK.

I haven't hit one yet, huh? You guys all knew all this. OK. Clearing Attributes. Now, I don't
usually include a list routine in my secrets. But I loved this one so much that I thought I have to

make sure everybody knows about it.

In the handout will tell you the website where you can go download it, it's free. Or you email

me, I'll set it to you because it's free. But if you wanted to clear out a attribute field, in the past
you double click on it and you'd have to go ahead and delete that to clear out each one. Right.

So that took how many clicks? Like four clicks.

If you run a command called [? At ?] Wipe, which is free, and you just go ahead and pick the
 attribute, it just wipes it out. Isn't that--

AUDIENCE: Ahh.

PRESENTER: Yep. I've been using that one. And I thought, OK, I got to make sure everybody knows about
that. I hadn't done this one for a while, and I though, ah, I got to put that one out there. So that
one's free so download it. That's the only one I have in the secrets that you have to actually go

get something to get it to work.

But free is always good. OK. This one I did repeat from last year because I keep getting
requests on how to make this. This is actually a block that has has a field that will read the

insertion point of the block. So if I go ahead and I add this one. I'll select it and put Add
Selected.

You can see what the block looks like by default. If I come over here and I snap to something.
And I'll just go Enter, Enter, Enter. Oops, I didn't really want that to be at an angle but, all right,

see it picks up the insertion point? And my insertion point is that the little dot on the end of the
leader. OK.

If I take this and I move it or let's just copy it. Oops. I hit the button too quick. Copy. Come on,
Copy. Oop, I went passed it. Sorry, better read, huh? Copy. Sometimes you can't click. There

we go. Copy.

And you see I made one for XY as well. Now, it doesn't look like it necessarily worked. But if I
re-gen, they'll all update with their insertion points. So I have any civil people out there? Great
way to label your points that you need to label. All right. Now, how did I make that?

If we edit that block. And we come in here and we look at-- let's just look at X. All right. It's a
field. It's the insertion point field. And if I select that and I go to Edit field, you'll see that I did an

object and I selected my object, which was my piece of my field. It's a block placeholder, which
means it's going to look at something about the block when the block is inserted.

I went looked for the position. I specified how I wanted the units to be displayed. And then I
selected that I wanted that one to be the X value. And I did the exact same thing for the X, the
Y, and the Z. All right. And then you pick OK, OK. And that's basically what you have in your
block.

And then this here is just actually a piece of text to label it. So these three right here are the X,
Y, and Z fields. All right. OK.

Did you know, this is an oldie but a goody, did you know you could trim your dimensions? I'm

going to run the Trim Command. And I can just select everything here. First of all, don't you
love the new preview? Right. Yes. But you can come in here and trim your dimensions. Did
you know that? All right.

Well then if you didn't know it, isn't it an ooh or an ahh? I know, it's early in the morning. Did
you not eat breakfast? Or actually, did you not get your coffee? All right.

2016. This is another 2016 one that I wanted to throw in. We all edit our dimensions. But of
course, you never edit the real true value away. Right. Of course not. Because we're all
exactly precise on how we draft.

If you double click on the dimension text now, it actually opens up a functional MTEXT editor,

which allows you to rewrap it. Yea. Did you not want that? I've been waiting for this one for a
long time. And you can add whatever text you need. Right. I thought that was a huge
improvement. OK.

There's a new dimension command. If you're in 2016, you've already found it. You've already
been using it. And it's your favorite. Right.

How many of you still type in DIM from the old days? To get the old dimension command?
Well, that one's gone now. And now you're going to get this one. All right. So the key in for this
is DIM. So they're going to force you into the new world. All right.

But the new dimension command actually looks at what you hover on. So if I come in and I

hover on a circle, it's going to give me a diameter. If I hover on a line, it will give me linear. So
a parallel line will give me-- if I get that to hover. I didn't mean to catch that. See, there's that
one.

I get an aligned if it's an angled line. If it's a straight line, you're going to get the straight line.
And whichever one you pick when you finally select it, that's where you drag your dimension
out. All right. Now there's a couple of other really neat things that you can do with this.

If you're using this new command. And let's say I want to split this 2.0 dimension into two. If I
hover here and I select this, when I come up here and I select on this dimension-- come on.

Oop, I must have fat fingered it. Come on. Find it. Oh, come on. Why aren't you giving me the
 break?

Yeah. But I don't want to you use-- oh, but you know why? Because I don't have my dynamic
input turned on. Who uses dynamic input? Yeah. This one is easier to see if you use this.

So I select it and I come up. And now I select this. And there's a new breakup option. If I do
the breakup and I select this dimension, it'll actually break this dimension. It's supposed to
break up. There we go. And it'll break it into two. Isn't that a great option?

So now you don't have to trim and then dimension. Right. So that saved me a couple steps.
And if you're doing the dimension command and you're on a circle and you select that, you'll

see you have an option to change to radius right at that point so you don't have to even really
have those other commands.

So now the only command you really need to use is DIM, unless you're dimensioning between
things. Yes?

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE].

PRESENTER: You want the length of the arc?

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] the link from this point to this but that line happens to be an arc.

PRESENTER: Right. The question was how do you dimension the length of an arc? And in AutoCAD it's not a
simple process. Right. Any other civil people out there?

So I would be happy to show you the steps you have to go through to do that. But I have to set
up a specific dimension style in order to do that. So send me an email after the fact, and if
anybody else wants that too, and I can send you the step-by-steps to do that, show you what
you need to set up. Because you have to set up a specific style to get that to work. OK. OK. All

right.

This is another oldie but I want to make sure everybody knows about it. You edit your text. And

you want this to be a typical dimension. Right. And you don't want it to stay up on that line. You
want to go down below.

I'm actually going-- am I in the right file here? Let's see. Yes I am. OK. Because I have a style
in here that I want to use.
 How do I get TYP to go below the line? Because if I hit Enter, it does that. Right. Somebody
knew it. What do you do? Backslash, capital X. Right.

And that will actually send it below the line. Now if you do this a lot, like you maybe have-- well,
I'm not saying you should do this a lot. But what if you have a not to scale dimension because
you're in a hurry. Right. But then you always go back and fix it. Yeah, right. I know you don't.

If I have a dimension that I want to do this on, what I do is I create a style so the users can do

this easily. You select the dimension, right click, and if you go to Style, you could have a
Typical Dimension or a Not to Scale Dimension. And it'll automatically put it on there for you.
All right.

So it's important that you make life easier because otherwise your users don't do what they're
supposed to do. Right. So how I did that is if you look at the dimensions styles for typical, all I
did was underneath of-- which prime? There it is. As a suffix or a prefix, whichever one you

want it to use, I put the backslash X with the TYP.

And then that will force that to be below any true number that is in my dimension. All right. Now

if you edit your dimension so that it's no longer true, first of all, I'll slap your hand. Right. Now
how do you restore it?

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE].

PRESENTER: Excellent. You come in here, highlight that number, and you do less than and greater than.
Now, this I've had trouble with this. Yeah, I have had trouble with this before. I end up now in
16, I have to come over here and do it in my override right here.

I'm going to have to report that one. Because they don't like that. Right. I don't like having to
do it from Properties. And something about MTEXT editor's not letting me put that back in. OK.
We already talked about split dimensions. OK.

Quick Edit MLEADERS. Everybody knows that if you select a multileader, you can remove the

leader. Right. All right. That's a given. I'm assuming that's not a secret.

Now the secret is, how can I quickly come in and just delete one line without using Remove

Leader? Because this way is quicker. Who was in my Jeopardy class? What's your favorite key
in on AutoCAD?
AUDIENCE: Control.

PRESENTER: Control. So if I come in, did you know that if you hold the Control key down and you select the
leader line, you can just hit Delete? Isn't that nice? And another thing you can do-- so once
you find that out, you start trying things out. Well, what if I zoom in here and I use the Control
key and I pick just the arrowhead? Hmm. What could I do with that? So if I want to change the

arrowhead, I'm going to turn on Quick Properties. And let's change it to Open, Closed Blank.
They're all changing. I can change the size. Oops.

Isn't that cool? No? I thought it was cool. So I'm sorry. OK. Maybe I'm weird. But I thought that
was cool.

You can also come in, select the line, and using Quick Properties, you can change it from one
type to another. None. Now that splat does not look like a spline. So I'm not sure what's
happening with that spline. But I may have to modify this a little bit. That is not a spline.

Let's try this one. I'll do it over here. There we go. Now let's change that to spline. There, that's
how it's supposed to work. I'm not sure why that one's not working. All right.

So you can change any part of the multileader. So now you can have a multileader with some
straight lines and some spline lines. Because you can't define it that way as a style, can you?

Nope. All right. OK.

The Forgotten Dimension Command. Everybody knows that if you do DIM Aligned, right, and I
would snap here and here, I'm going to get a crooked dimension. Because don't DIM Aligned
aligns to your snap points. That's not what I want to do.

So there is a key-in only command called DIM Rotated that the only way to find it is if you key it
in. So if I type in DIM Rotated, all right, specify the angle of the dimension line. Let's just angle
it with that. Now if I snap to those points, it stays parallel.

AUDIENCE: Ahh.

PRESENTER: Now you're a good draftsman. Right. We got these rule that you still have to follow. Some of
you are old enough to have done drafting by hand. Right. Remember those old days when we

used those archaic things like pencils and pens? All right.

I had a student once go, draw by hand? What do you mean draw by hand?
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] the dimensions this time will reflect those two points that you did this last time. So

that you dragging up the dimension, bring your cursor back to the first line, it's [INAUDIBLE] a
line.

PRESENTER: The new one? This one? All right. You get a prize if this works. Because that's a tip I didn't
know. So you go from here to here.

AUDIENCE: Right. Now, bring your cursor-- keep going down like you're going to drag it out. Go down.
Yeah. Keep going down.

PRESENTER: Oh, see the angle you mean?

AUDIENCE: All the way, keep going.

PRESENTER: Keep going to where?

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE].

PRESENTER: I'm trying.

AUDIENCE: Oh, it's going straight up and down.

PRESENTER: Um-- [CREAK]

[LAUGHTER]

That's OK. You almost got a prize. That would be cool if I can hover here though and it would
align. Right. Now, I did notice there is an angle. But that's a text angle. So I don't think I can do
that. But that was a good idea.

Go to the [? Aug-U ?] website and do a wish list. Because I think that's a great idea. I'll give
you a small prize if you come up. All right.

Yes, anybody who gives me tips that I don't know. Because I can't find all these. You guys

have to help me. OK. Now, I already did number 14. How would you reset all of your
dimensions to be true?

If somebody's overwritten them, you do the less than, greater than. Right. So how would you
do that globally? Just select all your dimensions and use Properties. Right. OK. OK.
 Here I just have my regular dimensions from a drawing that I did years and years ago. How
many of you are using parametric? Really? None of you?

AUDIENCE: Yeah, me.

PRESENTER: All right. There's one. Yea. Star pupils. OK.

If you've got an old drawing and you want to now make it parametric, all right, but it's already
got the dimensions already on it. There is a button right here that allows you to convert the old
dimensions to a parametric dimension. Now, it doesn't initially look like it's going to do what
you want. Because it does that. All right.

The reason it does that is because D1 is the value that's the parameter name. Right. If you
look at this variable right here, Constraint Name Format. What you need to do is change this
variable so that it doesn't give you the expression but it gives you the value. All right. So if I
come in here and I select this and I go to Properties, it's annotational. All right.

It does have to be annotational as well, just so you know. But I think they all come up that way

now by default. Prior to 2015/2016, I used to always have to come in here and change this to
annotational All right. Because it would turn into like a grayish.

It'll look like this initially. So be sure you come in here and change this to annotational. And
then if you type in that constraint name format. And I change it to a 1. Then it'll actually look
like a real dimension when it prints but it's still parametric. All right. All right.

This one, there's a couple answers for. Depends on what version you're in. How do I get my
dimensions to size themselves in my view ports? What's the best answer?

Annotation scale. Right. How many of you are using annotation scale? That's getting better.
It's getting better. Most people are still not liking it.

But it's a learning curve. Try again. If you don't use annotational dimensions, then what you
want to do is you want to set your DIM scale to 0. If you set your DIM scale to 0 and you
dimension in your view port AutoCAD will automatically size your dimensions anyway. OK.
Trust me, it works. OK.

I keep getting this question so I added it. All right. Sometimes you think people know things
and you find out that they don't. Here I want to do in angular dimension. And if I select my two
 lines, I get everything less than 180. Right. How do you get more than 180?

I get this question at least two or three times a year. You run the command differently. All right.
If you look, it asks you can hit Enter to specify the vertex. Read that thing called your

command line. Right.

If I hit Enter, I can now specify the vertex here. And I can go to here and here. And I can get
any angle that I want. See? It's hidden. People don't even know that. So good.

There were a few of you that hadn't discovered that. All right. Oops. Not Control P. You know
what, I better close some of these. I'm going to right click. Here's another good one.

I'll do right click up here. Close all other drawings. And we'll just say No. I wish there was a
close all and don't make me say no.

There we go. All right. Not that it would crash on me but-- OK.

I have a polyline. How do I get rid of that middle segment without exploding? All right. If I hold
the Control key down, our favorite key in AutoCAD, and you select this, it selects it as a sub-
object. Now, this command was initially intended for 3D. So you could select sub-objects in 3D.
But nobody said it wouldn't work in 2D.

So if you select this. And let me turn off my Quick Properties here. And you just hit the Delete
key, how many of you would still be exploding? Right. And here's the cool part. These stay
polylines.

AUDIENCE: Ahh.

PRESENTER: Right? It's even better. Explode is not the answer for everything. It should not be your first
solution. Ah, it doesn't work, explode it. Right.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE].

PRESENTER: Pardon?

AUDIENCE: Does that still stay at one [INAUDIBLE] line, you do you select multiple?

PRESENTER: You could select multiple.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE].
PRESENTER: Yeah, they're two separate. Yes. If I Control, Delete. Yeah, this is a polyline and that's a
polyline. They're not connected. But they stayed as polylines, whereas had you exploded it,
they would all be they would all be lines. Because then you exploded it to individual lines and
delete one of the lines. All right.

The Offset Command. Now I'll confess, the reason I looked for this one and figured it out and
was so happy when they finally did it was because I also teach MicroStation. This was one of
our missing commands in AutoCAD that we needed for a long time.

In the Offset Command, you can go through a point. You have a layer option. All right. So I'm
going to go ahead and set my distance to 12 inches. And then I want to go ahead-- actually,

let me change the layer first. L for layer.

I have the choice of current or source. All right. So my current layer is green and dashed. All
right. Source means it's going to take the original element or object that I pick and it's going to
let me offset that. All right.

So there's two options in here that are buried in the middle of the command that a lot of
people don't discover. And it's hard to do it if you do it manually. I'm going to show you to put it
on a button.

In the handout, I show you how to put it in a button. But if I do offset and I go ahead and pick
Enter and then I select my line, here's multiple. You've got to remember to pick M. All right.

What did I do? Did I type the wrong thing? All right. We're going to do enter for 12, select my
first line, and then I'm going to do M for multiple. Why is my M not showing up? There it is. All
right.

And now I can continue to do multiple offsets just by clicking whichever direction you want to
go. All right. Now, it's easy to lose that when you're working through the command because
you're not reading your command line. Right. The other one is to offset the current.

So, again, if we do Offset. Sorry, I'm a keyboard person. I'm going to assume you know where
the Offset Command is. I'll still do the 12. But I want the layer to be changed to be current. All
right. So now when I select this, it goes to my current layer. Right.

I used to do Utilities. Believe me, every utility line in your neighborhood runs along the property
line. But I don't want it on the same layer. And I don't want it the same color. Right. Yea. OK,
maybe it was just me.

But that was because I used to always have to offset and then I'd have to move it to where I
wanted it. All right. Now if you put this on a button, it's much easier. So I have a couple buttons
here. All right.

Offset Current, Offset Multiple, I show you in the handout what to put on the button. So now if I
go ahead and I do offset multiple, it just does it. All right. I'll just do the same distance, pick my
line. And remember, I'm set still to layer as current. All right. And you can also have one that

does layer to current or layer to multiple, Offset Multiple. OK.

You might also want one that says Offset Source, depending on how to use this. Is anybody in
pre-2009? I hope not, otherwise my tip would be upgrade.

[LAUGHTER]

But just in case you are, I also put the old way. Because you had to change how you did those
buttons along the way. So I still put the old key-ins for the buttons if anybody happens to be in
that old version. All right.

So now we've got on-the-fly base points. All right. This one, if I go ahead and I select this, I'm
actually going to go to Insert so I can show it to you first. So I'm going to insert my block, a real
complex drawing here, right. When I bring in my drawing and I want to change the insertion
point on the fly, this is a dynamic block. And I'll show you how I did this. If I'll hit the Control
key, I have alternative insertion points in my block that I can use.

So I can place it any way that I want. All right. Now there's a oops in 2016, in 2015, where if
you select the block, right click, and do Add Selected, which is how I place most of my blocks
anymore. I just pick the block that's already there, right click, Add Selected, and start inserting
more. It doesn't work.

I've logged it. Please go and vote for it to get fixed. Right. So you do have to be in the Insert
Command in order for that to work, not the Add Selected Command. All right. Now how I did

that was in the block itself, you have to define point parameters. You don't have to do any
actions. All you have to do is put a point parameter where you want your alternative insertion
points to be. And then every time you hit the Control key, it cycles between them. All right.

So you're just sitting there going Control, Control, Control, Control until you get to the insertion
 point that you want and you place it.

AUDIENCE: Does that work if have actions on them?

PRESENTER: It should work if you have actions on them too, yes. Yes. The question was, does it work if you
have an action assigned to the point? Yes it will. But be careful when you're inserting because
if your origin point and your point parameter are in the same place, I've had that cause a

problem. But-- All right.

Now, another option is this. If you have a once-off insertion point that you need, how do you
do that? How do you define your base point on the fly?

What's that thing you're supposed to be reading?

AUDIENCE: Command line.

PRESENTER: Look at your command line. You have a base point option. If you just type in B and you say I

need it to be offset from here like just a little bit, that is now your insertion point before you
place it. So you're in the insert command and you change it on a fly. Right. Just a one off. OK.

If you're afraid of dynamic blocks. But dynamic box are not hard. Start simple. OK.

This is one that I learned this year. And you won't believe how long we've been able to do this.
I was so disappointed. OK. I've got this arrow here. I'm going to copy it to the clipboard. Right.

So that when you paste it, it's exactly what I had when I copied it in the clipboard. Now first of
all, I would change one thing. Select your objects. And then do Control Shift C. What does that
give me? I can specify the base point that I want to pick it up from.

So I'm going to pick it up from here. That's not the tip yet. All right. So that now when I paste it,
that's how I have a hold of it. So first of all instead of doing Control C, do Control Shift C. All
right. Now the tip that I learned is an undocumented my command line is lying to me. There's
more stuff I can do than this. All right.

If I just type in R 90, I can paste my clipboard it any angle I want. It works as far back as I
could go. All right. Yes, it works in 3D. Question is, does it work in 3D? Yes, it does work in 3D.
Isn't that awesome?

So just R and give it an angle.

AUDIENCE: How about scale?

PRESENTER: I didn't try scale. I don't think scale. I think I did try it actually. It works.

AUDIENCE: Ahh.

PRESENTER: See, your command lines-- you get a prize. See, your command line is lying to you. There's
more there than they're telling you. All right. That was one of the ones I learned this year and I
was like, please don't tell me I could have done that all these years. Because how many times
have you pasted and rotated? A lot. All right. OK.

Quicker Join. There's a couple different ways you can do this. I've got all these lines. They're
either overlapped or separated. Right. I did the separated because you can see that better.
But they could also overlap.

We've all run into the drawing. Let's see, do and I not have it in this? That has those dash,

dash, dash, dash, dash, dash, dash somebody-- poor CAD operator who didn't do this right. I
don't have this file in here. But you've got overlapping segments or segments that are
connected together and it's like 500 objects rather than 1. All right.

Well, the new way to do it is to say Join. Right. If you pick Join and you select everything, it'll
join them all together. It should have. Maybe I have that too big. Oh, wonderful.

Because I do have a fuzz factor for the old way. One of things Join will not do though is it will
not join things around a corner. It'll only join things that are adjacent to each other. So you'd
have to do each one in its shape independently.

So how would you do it the old way if you wanted this entire shape to be joined? P Edit, right.

And you would select-- I'm just going to say M for multiple and select everything. Oops, missed
one. Two. All right.

Now what you want to do is there's a fuzz factor. All right. If you picked join, here's your fuzz
factor. So that's why I gave you the dimensions. My fuzz factor has to be bigger than 0.5. If I
made 0.3, it would only closed the 1 gap. If I do 0.6 and then I say Join-- come on.

And we'll go ahead and hit Enter. And it closed. Oh, why? Don't know why it didn't close that
one. It's the only 0.5. But it will actually come in and close all of those into a single polyline
because that one, the old P Edit Join while still go around corners. All right.
The reason my other two didn't is because I probably fat fingered it in the wrong order on the

command line. OK. Rotating the world. I only put this one in here because of 2016. Hopefully
everybody knows you have a UCS and you can rotate your world as you're working. Right.

So when you're rotating your world, whether you're in 2D or 3D, you can come in and you can
rotate by placing it by selecting an object. The problem is they turned off this panel by default.
So secret number one, when you first get in the new version of AutoCAD, whatever it is, go
check your ribbon out and look for stuff they turned off by default. Because I think they

assume you don't use it.

If you right click, Show Panels, it's not called UCS, it's called Coordinates. It's UCS. All right. So
there's all your commands that you can't find in the ribbon. And then of course you've got this
one here, where you could do rotate by object. All right. And you just select the object and it
rotates your cursor to match that object.

So now when you're drawing your lines, you don't have to have all those different polar angles
to find. Because all it really did-- I don't know if you can see it-- is it rotated my cursor. Right.
Now, I didn't know this until I was a trainer. And I would be teaching this command.

And we would run this command. And the first thing everybody would do-- it was almost in

unison. The whole room would just go gunk. Right. And they start looking at their screen like
this. Well, OK, so if you've ever had a sore neck while you're working, you need to have it
follow you so you can work straight. Because we like things to be straight. OK.

There's no straight road in this world, I'm telling you. UCS follow used to be a bad thing
because it would be a performance hit. All right. Not the case anymore, at least not I haven't
run into a being any kind of a hit on my performance. So if I change this. And now I say rotate

by object by using that button.

And I pick one of these lines. It will do a Zoom Extents. And then you can zoom in and it
rotated. All right. Now, one of the tricks that-- be honest with you, I can't get it to work in 2016.
But when you do the UCS follow and it does a zoom, it actually does the previous zoom. So
we're going to try it again.

But it doesn't work all the time. I'll do a Zoom to Objects and just select some stuff. So it zooms
to the object. Then when I come in-- so I did this like zoom factor right before, now if I pick an
align, now it works.
Yea, for once it works when I'm demonstrating. So if you don't like that UCS follow going all the

way out to Zoom Extents, what it really looks for is your previous zoom. So if you built a button
that did a zoom objects and you selected your area of your view first and then did that and
then run this UCS object, it won't go all the way out in your drawing and come back in. It will
just rotate what you're looking in your view.

Because you know when you do a zoom, you have an option in here, right, to specify objects.
So just select whatever you want to select. You have to be careful, you might have some long

ones that go all the way out. But it will control your Zoom factor. Then run the UCS follow and
it does what you want. Because that's a question everybody always asks is, how do you keep
UCS follow from zooming extents? All right.

I'll do this one. It's kind of an oldie one. There's still an old command called Change. All right,
Change used to be what we would do for Properties back in the old days. Anybody old enough
in here to remember change? Couple of you? All right.

I exaggerated these. But say you have a bunch of lines in your drawing that are supposed to
be orthogonal but they're not. Yes, you could go to each one them in Properties and change
the angle to 0 or to 90. But this is actually easier I think.

So if I do is change and I'm on polar by default, I'll show what it'll do. Because I'm usually in
polar not ortho. I'll select my objects. When you pick a point, they'll all go to that point. All right.

But if you're in ortho here and you do change and select them all, select this, it will make them
all orthogonal. That's easier than Properties. OK.

Nudge Objects. Everyone know about the Nudge Command? Anybody not know about the
Nudge Command? This is so fun because this is what we used to tell you not to do, draw by
eyeballing it. But we're going to eyeball it by distances.

So the Nudge Command is pretty cool. But you got to know how to control it. So you hold
down the Control key on your keyboard. All right. There's no command. You just hold down

the Control key on your keyboard and you hit your arrows. And it nudges. All right.

Now, that's great except-- go back to where we were. OK. Sometimes I get too carried away
with my keyboard. How do you control the distance? How you control the distance is with your
Snap.
 In your Snap settings, if you turn on Snap temporarily, so you could make a Nudge button.
Whatever your X and Y spacing is is what it uses to nudge. All right. It'll control your nudge.

So now because Snap is on, if I Control and I right click to my arrow key, it's nudging by 0.5.
And if I Control up, it goes by 0.5. Cool. So now Nudge is useful. Well, OK, I thought it was. All
right.

The CAL Command. If you're using a current version of AutoCAD, which most of you are,
hopefully everybody knows about the mid between two points. Yes? Yes. One of your
favorites. Right. OK.

But what this really does is the same thing as our old CAL Command did. So if you've ever
tried to use, this one goes between two points. But how do I do something like every third point
or every fifth point or maybe I want to divide something into three? Yes, I can run the Divide
Command and I can get my nodes and then I can use the nodes and then I can draw what I
need and delete the nodes and I'm done. Right.

Well, what you can also do is change this so that this says divide something by three. And if

you put this on a button, then you can avoid the Divide Command. So let's say that I want to
divide the top of this line right here into three equal pieces. So what I'm going to do is I'm
going to draw the line. All right.

I have no snappable point here. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to do the tick because I
want to run a transparent command, CAL, Enter. Now I want to do my distance from end--
spell right-- to end divided by 3. All right. I'm sorry that aperture box is big but it's because it's

like an old command.

From here to here. And then if I go ahead-- come on, do it, do it, do it. Oh, I'm not sure what
that did. It shouldn't have a blank there. Oh, you know why? Because I typed it wrong.

Distance end comma end. See, I did type it right. I just ignored myself when I was typing it.
From here to here. And then I should be able to just pick. It's not letting me pick.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE].

PRESENTER: It's not letting me pick, though.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE].
PRESENTER: I did again? All right. Well, you could type it in. But it's end comma end. And it lets you divide

that by 3 or divide it by 2 or divide it by whatever. All right. Now if it's just by 2, I'm going to be
honest, you should be using this one.

So if you want the centerline here, you should be using midpoint between two points to find
that center. Right. Everyone knows that one? Hopefully. And you can do any snap that you
have running. All right. Or you could even get an on-the-fly one if you want an on-the-fly one.
OK.

Did you know-- I'm going to type in the Fillet Command. And I'm going to go ahead and
change my radius to 2. Did you can fillet between circles? I didn't know you could do that
either.

This one we all learned a couple years ago. And I was like, do you know how many tangents
I've been drawing? Right. The tangent, tangent, radius thing. This fillet is so much easier. All
right. How about filleting parallel lines, what will that do?

You just pick a minute fillets between them. Right. You don't even have to get it the radius.
Because where is it getting the radius? From the elements you're selecting, the two straight
lines that you're selecting, it's getting it from there. So those are some of the hidden things in

the Fillet Command.

And then what's the last one if you have two lines that you want to make a corner and you run
Fillet, how do you guarantee that the radius is 0? Use the Shift key. And it overrides your
current radius setting and always gives you a 0. So you should never, ever have to set your
radius to 0 ever again. Because that's one you use the most anyway. OK.

Groups. Again, I confess I use Groups a lot when I was a MicroStation users. So of course I
missed using groups when I was in AutoCAD. So now in AutoCAD, they have really, really
good groups. So and they actually have put a panel up here now for you as well. So is
everybody using groups?

Groups are like temporary blocks. All right. That you can kind of like make them a block and
not a block on-the-fly. So let's say, for example, I want to take this group. And I'm going to go
ahead and name it so I can show it to you in the Group Manager Dialog. And I'll go ahead and
call it keypad.
Then I'm going to select all of these. Those are now a group. If you look up here and you go to
your group manager, you'll see that you have keypad in the list. All right. So it's a valid group.

You can come in and you can Add objects, Select, Remove objects, different things here. So
now when I select this, it's a group. It's basically like an unnamed block. All right.

If you look at it over here, it'll actually tell you that it's a group now. In the older versions, it
would tell you that it was some bogus looking really weird block name. All right. So now if I
want to move something, there's a hot key, Control Shift A, that says, OK, don't recognize
groups anymore. So now if I take this and I move this, I can move these three. We'll just move

them up here. All right.

Nothing's a group anymore. Control Shift A, group on. I want you to recognize groups in my
file now. And now this is a group again.

So who here does furniture layouts? Right. We used to do our cubicles in groups. Because I
guarantee you if you're laying out an office, you're going to hit a column. Right. The columns
are never spaced the way you need them. All right.

Those structural guys just want the building to stand up. Right. They're not thinking about that
end of the road stuff. So if you make your furniture arrangements a group, it's pretty easy to
place those and then just move something on the fly but then still be able to move it all is one.

Right. OK.

And I'm sure if you do some other discipline, you've got some use for that too. I can just tell
you what I used it for when I had a real job. Back when I had to actually do drafting. OK.

Who uses Dynamic Input? Anybody? OK. First thing I always tell people, because most people
don't like dynamic input because when they're out there drawing, they don't like all the stuff on
their cursor. Right. Well, the first thing I suggest is a you turn off some the stuff and then it's
actually pretty useful. Prior to 2016, there was another setting called Tool Tip Merge that
would take all the prompts and merging them into a single section that flies around. So instead
of getting two or three, you just get one. All right.

It's broken in 2016. But it's still there so we'll just have to wait till that gets fixed. Now in
dynamic here, what you really need to do is turn off the stuff you don't care about. All right. If
you don't care about the pointer input, I do want dimensions, but I like to come in and change
them and maybe only show one at a time. All right.
 Then you can do the Tab key to get to the other one. So you decide how you want to work
with that. And then you can also show additional things if you need to. But it's way too much if

you ask me. Then I get confused because I got all this stuff move my cursor and I like want to
shake the cursor and get rid of it. Right.

It's just too complicated. So if you trim down all of this. And I changed mine to be really huge
and pink so that you guys could see it better, you wouldn't make it that big of course. All right.
And so now when you're drawing, I'm only going to see one dimension. All right. If I hit Tab, I'll
go to the angle. But I only see one at a time.

Much more usable. Now when you're doing polar, it used to be it kind of flicks around on you a
little bit. See how it's flipping between endpoint and it's not even showing me the polar right
now because it's not falling in correctly. It should be showing me the polar angle at the same

time it's showing me specify next point.

If Tool Tip Merge was working correctly, it would show you the polar angle plus, the prompt. It
takes those and merges them together. Now what it's doing, I think, is instead of merging it like
this, it's merging it like this, which isn't terribly helpful. Right. OK.

So Tool Tip Merge. Once I did those few things, I loved dynamic input. And you really should
try it again because there are things showing up on dynamic input that you wouldn't
necessarily see anyplace else. So check it out. OK.

Quick Access Toolbar. Has everybody made their own and customized it? Yes?

AUDIENCE: Yes.

PRESENTER: If you haven't, uh. OK. The Quick Access Toolbar up here. Right. Yes it comes in with certain
things that are default, kind of like the Windows standard toolbar. All right. But that's really not
as functional as it can be for AutoCAD.

First of all, you don't want the workspace. Who cares what workspace they're in. Really? Right.
So you don't need that up there. So turn that one off. I'm using this little down arrow here. And
add the layer list.

Don't you use the layer list way more than changing your workspace? Yes. And I think the
workspace is still the default up there when you're in 2016. So but you look here, you don't
 have layers in this list. So anything that you want to add up here, all you have to do is right
click on top of it, and add it to your Quick Access Toolbar. And it is not smart enough not to
add it twice. All right.

So I'm just warning you. So here you can-- I'm going to get in a file that has more layers in it.
Oh, is that one already open? I got to have a file here that has-- there we go. All right. So you'll
have all your layers.

So now because why do you need that one? What if you're placing annotation? Still need
access to your layers, don't you? How many of you are still popping back and forth between
home and something else just to get to layers? Right. Stop.

Put your layers up there. And it's available no matter what ribbon you're on. Because
everybody's using the ribbon. Right.

AUDIENCE: Right.

PRESENTER: First question I always get, where's my AutoCAD Classic? How do I get my AutoCAD Classic
back? Well just you know, you can get your AutoCAD Classic back. But you have to make it
yourself because they no longer deliver it.

But everything is still in there. All right. You just got turn your toolbars on and you got to
replicate your old AutoCAD Classic and say that workspace. I think I saved one. I did. Ahh,
right?

AUDIENCE: Ooh.

PRESENTER: I know, everybody just went, I'm home. I'll be honest with you, I prefer the ribbon now. I still
like to have a couple toolbars. But I still kind of prefer the ribbon. I've been ribbonized. All right.

So any command up here. Now, some of the commands that I add up here that I think are
missing, Layer Manager or the Layer Properties, I like to add Layer Properties. In the
dropdown list, I like to add Match Properties and Plot. Again, I'm a keyboard person so I

typically do Control P to plot, Control O to open.

If I'm doing undo and redo, I'm a Control Z person. Because I'm a keyboard oriented person.
And you'll never change me. I don't care Autodesk. That's the way I was built. All right.

Somebody who's young is probably a button person. All right. I'm not. I grew up with DOS so I
 like to key stuff in. All right. So I do a lot of hot keys. But that means that I can take these off.

So I'm never going to hit this Open button ever. I can guarantee you. So I don't need it. I'm
never going to hit Undo and Redo from here. I'm just not going to do it. I know I'm not.

So save my space and then start adding the commands in here that you do all the time. Now,
Match Properties is in the list. You can add that one. I also like to add the Properties button
because there's a few times when I right click that Properties is not there.

But I like to have it. So it's a nice button to have up there in case I'm not on the Home tab. All
right. So tweak that. Get your Quick Access Toolbar doing whatever your top 10 commands
are, they should be up there. Right.

And see, I can't key in layer and change my layer so I had to put that one up there. All right.

Oh, the Status Bar. Good news and bad news. Bad news is they changed the icons again.
They made some of them colored so you can't tell when they're blue. Right. Like this one
down here, Selection Cycling, it's green.

When I make it blue, yeah right, I can hardly tell I made that blue. So that's my first problem
with it. Second problem with it there's no icons. You have to have icons. They don't let you
have the text anymore. Complain please.

Make them bring back our text. We have room for text. All right.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE].

PRESENTER: You what?

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE].

PRESENTER: I can't hear you. what section.

AUDIENCE: Blue.

PRESENTER: Oh, a blue. Yeah. That's true. But, Yeah, I just don't like it. I hate it. Now, I have everything
turned on. I would not normally have all these turned on. But I turned them all on for you
because you have a list over here of everything that you can and can't turn on. Right.

I just turned everything on so you can see everything because I might as well. It's not like it's
taking up my whole screen space anyway. Now, you can come in and you can turn things on
and off. Some of the good news is that you can right click here and say dock with a status bar
for your layout.

So you can actually make your layouts. This is all wasted gray space. Do you agree? So I can
actually turn this on. But because I have my coordinates on, there's a problem with how this
works with coordinates. Because coordinates is always growing and shrinking.

So what happens is if coordinates gets long enough that it has to push your layouts up, you're
going to see this thing going eh, eh, eh, and it'll make that sound too. Eh, eh, eh, eh. No, it
won't.

So what I found is if you come over here and you turn off your coordinates if you're not using
them anyway really and then you can go ahead and have the layouts down here in the same
line as your status bar. All right. Because of the dock in line with status bar. If you dock above
the status bar, will completely ignore that. All right.

But the only field down in your status bar that really changes size is your coordinates. And
because that has to shrink and grow, it will sometimes force this to start moving around on
you. And you never like anything that flickers in the corner of your eye. Right. So you have to
decide how you like to do that. All right.

Unless I'm doing civil. Be honest, architects, we don't care what the coordinate is? Right.
That's the civil, that's your job. I don't care where my building is. That's your job. All right. I just
care where the walls are to each other. OK.

Another one that is not used very often that I think is a shame is Quick Properties. Who uses
Quick Properties? Not nearly enough of you. All right. So I thought what can I use in Quick
Properties that I can't really do any other way easily?

I had a question with tolerance dimensions. I was working at a manufacturing company and
they were saying how difficult it was for them to come over to Properties and come down here
and find all the tolerancing stuff because of all the way at the bottom. Right. So all that

scrolling, that's how they're changing it all the time, is really tedious.

So we go ahead and turn on Quick Properties. And then I'll select this. By default it's not going
to be in there. All right. What you need to do is you need to tweak your Quick Properties on a
per object type basis.
 So I want to tweak how a tolerance dimension, what fields does Quick Properties show me?
So if I right click down here and I go to Customize. Takes it a minute to load. Here is my
rotated dimension.

If I come all the way down here, I can say, OK, I want to get some of this. I want the alignment.
I'll do limit upper, lower, and precision. All right. I'm going to turn those three things on

because those are the things I change the most.

I hit Apply. And OK. Now when I select this tolerance dimension, I can come in here and I can
change this to be anything that I want. Oops. I didn't want to hit that button.

We can change the type. Oh, I didn't put the type in there. Because you can change it from
symmetrical to what's the other type? I'm not a mechanical guy. All right. So you can come in
here now you can actually change that. So let's change it to 0.01. And then I can go ahead
and change the precision to 2. Easier?

AUDIENCE: Does this work with vertical products too? Like [? civil products. ?]

PRESENTER: It does work with vertical products. I don't know for sure what properties are in all the vertical
products. But Quick Properties is there if it's AutoCAD based. Yep.

Now when you tweak this, when I first come in here, it doesn't list all your object types. If you
right click, you can Edit the object type list. Oh, don't crash. Should come up with my list. Do,
do, do, do. Come on. OK. I'm not sure why that's not coming in.

It should list a list of all like line dimensions, circle, polyline, arc. It'll list all those object types.
And let's see if I hit this button if it'll let me do it. Oh, you hate that blue spin-y thing, don't you?

You just pick the object types you want in this list. And then you can tweak those object types
Quick Properties. All right. I'm afraid that might be-- it's scaring me because it's just spinning
blue and not coming up. OK.

I kind of already showed you this one, your multi-document interface management now.
Because you have the tabs now, which is a great thing, isn't it? Don't you love all the File tabs?
Yes.

If you come in here, you now have open file location. I used to have to make a button to do
this so that it would actually open up that location in my Windows Explorer so that I could look
this so that it would actually open up that location in my Windows Explorer so that I could look
for another project file. Because I have more than one project file open typically, unless you're
lucky and you only have to work on one project at a time. All right. Which that doesn't usually
happen either.

But now you can right click. And you've got all these extra multi-document interface commands
that are handy right there on the right click menu. And what does the asterisk mean? It's
changed but not saved. All right. And, of course, you can close it by hitting the X. Those are I
think some of the obvious ones. I didn't need to point those out.

You can rearrange them by dragging and dropping them. That can be handy. Same with your
Layout tabs. Right. You drag and drop your Layout tabs.

One thing that you can do if you hover here is you get the pictures. Right. Some people,
depending on the quality of your video card, this actually might be a performance hit. All right.
It might be too slow. Because we never like anything that takes longer than a hundredth of a
second. Right.

So if these are too slow, all right, if you don't like that. You can turn those off. All right. Also if
you don't like the fact that it switches your file, see how when I do my thumb hover it changes
my display so that I can see it big in the background? If you've got really big files, this might
not be the greatest enhancement for you. In the handout, I gave you some configuration
variables that you can change so that your thumbnail hover won't switch the background. It'll
just let you hover and you'll see the hover picture and not the background view change.

You can turn off the display of those completely if you don't like the File tab. So if you do like
File tab and it kind of shows you. See, there's File tab preview. All right. If I turn that off and
you hover and it's just-- oh, come on. I might have to exit and come back in. But there's three
or four settings, where you can change how your File tabs work.

There's also a way-- I'm sorry. I don't like the Start tab. I don't like it. I have tried it. It just
irritates me. So if you do the start up or start mode I think, turn it off, Start tab goes away. Yea.

Not everything new is good. Sometimes it takes years for me like something new. OK. There's
a bunch of shortcuts in there for control key and shift key. I'll let you read through those
because they're just typical things, like how do you cycle between overlapping objects? Shift
Space. Right. OK.
Or depending on your version, you might do Shift Tab. All right. The Control key, I've already
covered many of them. You use the Control key to get to sub-objects, to get this to faces, to
get to faces behind another face. All right. But I documented all of the Control and Shift in the
handout. You guys can read that when you get home. OK.

How do you convert your toolbar to a ribbon? Have your old toolbars that you made custom.
You left this class going, I'm going to go to the ribbon. Right. You've decided to make that
change. All right.

So how do you get all your customer tool bars and make ribbons out of them? Not manually.
Heavens no. If you look in here at your CUI and you find your toolbar, if you right click, you can
convert it to a panel right like that. Right. Yes.

And then once you have your panel, you make your ribbon tab. And you drag and drop it and
put it on your ribbon. Right. So here you'll see that I've converted mine to my AU Secrets. And
there are my two buttons. All right.

It's just a right click. All right. Now, number 38 in your handout is a little more complicated. So
I'm going to show you a couple of them. I call it your CUI Magic. OK. Here I have two lines. All
right.

Everybody does double click editing. Agreed? Well, what is double click editing on a polyline
do? All right. Does yours change it to a polyline? If you put this on your double click editing,
you can double click Edit a line. And it'll convert it to a polyline automatically without you having
to do anything.

So no longer do you have to do P Edit, right, and change it. First of all it's a further on tip, but
when you run P Edit and you select this, right, it asks you that nasty question, doesn't it? This
is not a polyline, would you like to turn it into one? Who has ever said no?

Have you ever said no? I would assume if you weren't trying to convert it to a polyline, you
didn't run P Edit. All right. So first of all, I have to do this one. It's P Edit accept. I have my
turned-- if it's turned off and I run P Edit-- I don't know why it's not asking-- oh, maybe my
command line's too small. All right.

But change your P Edit accept to 1. And it will never, ever ask you that question again. All
right. That's the first thing. Also if I have a dimension here, I think I'll show you if I have these
in here. I can't remember if I put them on here by default.
We'll go in here. Here's my double click actions. All right. Here's my dimension. See, I don't
have on there yet, well, the line does. Convert to polyline. And here it is. I'll show you how I

made this. All right.

So there's what I put on so that when I double click on a line, it converts it to a polyline. OK. So
now I want to do dimension. And what I want it to do is when I double click on a dimension, I
want the arrow to flip. All right. So if you double click on the dimension or double click on a
hatch, what do you want it to do? All right.

So you come down here. And you actually have to make the button. So I'll make the button.
And we've got-- where is it? There it is. Flip arrow. So here's the key-in. All right.

Now I take this command and I drag it and I put it in my dimension. Now if you have a custom
CUI and you're not working in ACAD CUI, which hopefully nobody is editing their ACAD dot

CUI. Hopefully you all have your own. Right. And you have partially loaded your ACAD dot
CUI.

If you're confused on how to do this, look online. There's classes on how to do correctly use
your CUI files. If you come down here to the AutoCAD one, which I have it attached as read
only, and you look at double click menus. You just have to find the object type. All right.

So what object do you want to change its double click behavior? So you find the one that you
want. See, right now it's doing text edit. That's why when I double click on a dimension, it does
the MTEXT editing. Well, now I'm overriding that. All right.

So remember, only one double click action per object type. OK. I did this one on purpose so I

could show you how I'm going to disable text editing. So here. So some changes can be bad
when you realize what you've done.

But if I do the flip arrow and I pick OK and we'll go ahead and put a dimension-- oops. I should
use the new one. Oh, I need my DIM scale to be a little bit bigger, don't I? Let's make it 4. Still
too small. OK, I'll zoom in.

So now when I double click on this, it flips the arrow. But what did that just disable? I can't edit
my text now with a double click. So watch out for that. Just because you want to change a
double click, it's not like I can have a dimension double click two or three different ways. Of
course, I'd love it if they would let me do that.
 Like if I double click on the arrow, flip it. If I double click on a text, edit it. Wouldn't that be cool?
Yeah. Change request. OK.

There's more than these two in the handout.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE].

PRESENTER: You can. But I wanted to show you purposely how you can break the default double click
action. But you're absolutely right. I don't want my Quick Properties. If you hover and right click
or actually just hover if you're using dynamic. And, yes, you can flip it there too.

But this isn't the only time that you're going to try to put a double click action on something and
then realize you just disabled something else that's more important. Right. OK. There's about--
let's see I got four different kinds of double click CUI Magic stuff in the handout. So you can
look at those. OK.

Here's a good one. Everybody's using tables I hope. Yes? You're using Smart Tables? Of
course you are. OK. Here's my table. I've made this specific table that I want to use as a
standard table in my drawings. So I've set up the table style and I've got everything working.

Now, how do you put the table over here on your tool palette? You can grab it and try to drag
it. But what happens? It's hard to grab, isn't it? OK. Here's the trick.

Select your table, drag it with your right mouse button, not your left, so right click drag and
drop it on your tool palette. I don't know why it works but it works. Now when you go to place
this table, it's not quite what I wanted . See how it loses the text and you have to put that back
in.

So we would have standard tables that people would go in and fill out. But I didn't want the
users to have to fill out all the titles. The only thing that changed here was the times and
remark settings. All the rest of this was the same for every single table when they were doing
this machine cycling table. So I turn it into a block. All right.

If I turn into a block and I left click and drag it-- because we could left click and drag blocks--
and I put that on my tool pallet, then what I need to do is under Properties, I want to come in
here and say as soon as you place it, explode it so that it's a table. All right. Now when I select

it off my tool palate and I drop it, it will remember everything. That's how you set up standard
 tables with things filled out ahead of time.

AUDIENCE: Ahh.

PRESENTER: Yep. So make them all up ahead of time, put them on a tool pallet, all right, make them a
block, explode them on import. OK. We talked about selection cycling already. You use the
Shift Spacebar to cycle. Are you guys using your selection cycling? No? Please say you are.
OK.

I got lots of overlap and stuff here, don't I? Yes, I can do Shift Space, Space, Space, Space,
Space, Space, Space. I'm holding down the Shift key and I'm just toggling my space bar.

You've also got your selection cycling, which I like even better. Now I can just pick. And it tells
me everything that's at that location. And I just hover until I get the one I want and select it
from this little pop-up dialogue. Right.

And that's the new selection cycling down here, which nobody seems to be using. All right.
Here's an oldie but a goody. You have two view ports. You don't know what angle they're
rotated. Yes, you can look at Properties. But here's an oldie but goody.

If you twist-- whoops, I got to spell it right-- it's still there. Tells you what the angle of the view
port is. OK. Put it on a button, select click in the view port. It'll tell you without you having to do
anything else at all. OK.

One of the new ones that I absolutely love, does everybody use rev clouds?

AUDIENCE: Yeah.

PRESENTER: All right. How do you like the rev clouds in 16? Aren't they awesome? They're smart now. All
right. So of course you've got rev cloud. All right. In the handout, there is a variable now called
Rev Cloud Create Mode that you can specify whether you want the style freehand,
rectangular, or polygon by default.

And you do still have your style setting that you can set by default to be either this calligraphy
one you see up at the top or the normal, thicker one down below. Right. So if you do style, you
have the choice of normal or calligraphy. The one on the top is calligraphy. The one on the

bottom is normal.

So now let's look at what we can do with this. If I do rev cloud, of course it works pretty much
 the same way as you would always do rectangular, polygonal, freehand, whatever you want to
do. Right. So that really hasn't changed that much.

What has changed is if I run rev cloud, there's a new option called Modify. OK. Now, what's
neat is if you just start here and come down-- OK, I'm going to have to pick M. Here, here,
here. Then it wants to know what part you want to get rid of.

AUDIENCE: Ahh.

PRESENTER: I didn't even know I wanted that.

[LAUGHTER]

I would have thought just make them trimmable, I would have been happy. But with the
modify, it's like thank you. And I didn't even know I wanted that. All right. But if you set this up
on a button, you can easily have a rev cloud modify and a red cloud. And you can set all your
styles and everything exactly the way you want.

You shouldn't have any change in any of that on-the-fly while you're drawing. It should all be

preset.

[APPLAUSE FROM ANOTHER ROOM]

OK. Uh-oh, we must be getting close. We are. OK. I had a few here I didn't get to. But a lot of
the ones at the ends are system variables. I'll do one more because it's one of my favorites.

Generated 3D Solid. All right I have like five or six 3D ones at the end of the handout. So if you
come in here, here is my solid. Right. So let's say you have an old 2D drawing. Right. You
have an old 2D drawing that you've got.

You can run flat shot and get all the flat views of it. Right. So if I run flat shot, flat shot lets you
create the three flat views if you already have a model. But if you have a 2D drawing with all
the flat drawings, what you want to do is use your 3D rotate and rotate your 2D polylines. I
made my a polyline because it's just the outside shapes.

Rotate them into position, like I've done here. All right. 3D rotate. And then what you want to
do is you want to go ahead and we're going to go to my 3D tools here. And I'm just going to
press and pull. I'm going to select this. And I'm going to pull this up here.
 I'll pick this one and pull this one here. And then I'll take the bottom one and go up. All right. So
I basically stretching it into itself. Then what do I want to do? Intersect. Just keep the parts
where they intersect. Done.

Get rid of your polylines. You just converted your flat drawing into a 3D solid. Cool? Now, it
doesn't always work on everything. If you have holes in the middle and stuff like that, you have
to be a little careful how you're doing the intersect. But you can do intersect part of it and then
intersect the third part or union them together. Right. OK.

So did everybody learn at least five new things?

AUDIENCE: Yes.

PRESENTER: Yes?

AUDIENCE: Yes.

PRESENTER: All right. You were a little weak on the oohs and the ahhs. But I'll forgive you. So thank you for
attending. I hope it wasn't too long of a session for you.

Be sure to fill out your surveys to get your free trip next year. And I thank you all for showing
up so early.

[APPLAUSE]