Tips

If editing AutoCAD objects has you going crazy and feeling like you’re livin’ on the edge, it may be time to get a grip. Aerosmith references aside, grips are the foundation for countless editing tasks within AutoCAD. Because of this ubiquity when editing objects, it’s no surprise the more you can get a grip, the […]

For the Have You Tried this month, we have some great techniques for selecting and deselecting objects. Window and crossing window are great selection methods in most cases, but for larger, more complex drawings it might be helpful to use other methods like fence or lasso. And after objects are selected, maybe there are some […]

Layers. They’re one of the most frequently accessed features in AutoCAD. Not surprisingly, there are a lot of tools and settings for them. If your Command Line search options are enabled (and if not, why not?), typing in Layer will return just under 40 entries. Many of them are available from the Layers panel in […]

For the Have You Tried this month, we have some great techniques for removing the visual clutter from complex drawings that have lots of overlapping objects. Overlapping objects and annotation can decrease readability while at the same time increase the chances for confusion of a design. Creating wipeouts and using masks to hide parts of the […]

Having used AutoCAD for over 35 years (yikes!), I’ve seen a lot of changes, one of which is the Command Line. It’s gone from its original design as a utilitarian device to input commands, to a multi-functional digital assistant. Today we’ll investigate what options are available to you, and how you can adjust them to […]

Today’s post title takes inspiration from the classic Rolling Stones song. Some of us may remember how it was used it for an ad campaign back in the day to extol the virtues of the new Start button in Windows 95®. But, if you’re of my ilk as a long time AutoCAD geek, you might […]

For the Have You Tried this month, we’re going to take a look at removing unused named objects and overlapping geometry to keep our drawings clean and tidy, and even possibly keep the file size down along the way. Unused named objects can be block definitions, layers, or linetypes that are no longer used or […]

As a veteran AutoCAD user (this year marks 36 years!) I always have a few settings I change whenever I open a new version for the first time. Among my usual suspects are PICKBOX, OSMODE, and CURSORSIZE. I’ll also open the Palettes I like and anchor them in my preferred positions, left or right. But […]

For this Have You Tried, we’re going to give names to AutoCAD views. A view consists of a specific magnification, location, and orientation that you can save and assign a name. This is called a named view. Named views make it easy to return to a specific view of the drawing at any time. Specific layer visibility […]