Top Productivity Tips for AutoCAD 2009 Jonathan Christie Course Summary: Find out how to apply new and existing AutoCAD power tools and watch your drafting productivity improve. Learn how to re-use design data with Design Center, automate repetitive steps with the Action Recorder, link to MS Office, and control multiple scales for annotation. Instructor: Jonathan Christie Application Engineer KETIV Technologies Jonathan is a certified Autodesk instructor, and has a BS in Engineering from Lafayette College. Jonathan applied his AutoCAD skills as a designer for an engineering firm for several years before joining KETIV where he trains and supports AutoCAD users.
Intro... 3 Increase your efficiency... 3 Action Recorder... 3 Annotation Scaling... 4 Improve the accuracy of your drawings... 4 Data Links... 5 Reuse information... 6 Design Center... 6 Tool Palettes... 6 Additional tools... 7 Multi leaders... 7 MText Editor... 8 Viewport Layer controls... 8 Find & Replace... 9 Conclusion... 9 2 of 10
Intro Welcome. We will be looking at some of the tools that can provide significant increases in productivity. Some of these tools are brand new, and some are expansions of existing capabilities. But all will help you complete your designs faster and with less errors and omissions. Increase your efficiency There is hardly a designer around who wouldn t prefer tools that automate repetitive processes. Over the years, designers and programmers have come up with some workarounds or best practices to minimize duplication of efforts. One such method was writing macros, lists of commands to automate. Another example was using a series of text styles for each viewport scale, to ensure that the printed text height would be appropriate. AutoCAD 2009 has incorporated some of these practices into new features which will help improve efficiency with less initial effort. Action Recorder The first of these is the new Action Recorder which creates a macro for you. The Action Recorder tool is best used from the Tools Ribbon Tab. To use the Action Recorder, start recording, then go about the steps you want to record, and stop the recording. This tool is flexible and works with most commands, but will not record any choices you make within a dialog box. As such, its best to use the command line versions of commands that open dialog boxes (typically this is done by adding a dash mark in front of the command). If it is necessary to include a dialog box in a macro, playing the action will pause for you to fill out the dialog box. As an example, we will use the Action Recorder tool to create a macro that will clean up a drawing. 1. Go to Tools Ribbon tab and click on Start recording button. 2. Type scalelistedit. Using the dynamic input, select Reset, Yes, and Exit. 3. Then type purge. Again, using dynamic input, choose No. Hit enter to select all object names. Type No when asked about prompts for object names. 4. Finally, click on the Audit button (also found on the Tools Ribbon tab). Type Yes. 5. Now click on the Stop recording button to complete this recording. 3 of 10
6. Assign a name for this macro, such as DrawingCleanup and click OK. 7. Now edit any commands as necessary. Right click on a step and choose Request User Input. 8. To run this macro at a later time, select the name DrawingCleanup from the dropdown in the Action Recorder panel, and click on Play. Annotation Scaling The second efficiency tool, annotation scaling, replaces the lists of text styles by establishing a printed text height for each style, and then scales the annotation objects in each viewport accordingly. In each style editor dialog box as well as in block and hatch creation settings, you will have a checkbox to make the objects annotative. This merely gives those objects the ability to scale when called upon. To take advantage of this capability, you need to switch modes from creating objects in model space to displaying them in paper space. Each viewport will need to be set to a fixed scale, as opposed to zooming in/out and leaving it at an approximate value. To use this tool effectively, you are best to set your drawing scale to the viewport scale you expect to use most commonly. Later, when you go to your layouts, turn on Annotation Visibility (the scale with a lightbulb) so that you can see all annotation objects, regardless if they are scaled as necessary for this viewport. Then select all the annotation objects that need to scale for this viewport, right click, and select Annotative Object Scale>Add Scale. These objects will then be scaled to the predefined paper text height in their respective styles. Improve the accuracy of your drawings Once a design has been completed, a set of documents is created to outline the fabrication of the item. This includes a parts list, which provides the list of parts needed, as well as give as 4 of 10
estimate of costs. Excel is an excellent program for creating and modifying tables; however, we then need to bring the parts list into AutoCAD without using OLE objects. Data links will help us with this last step connecting our AutoCAD drawing to the external spreadsheet. Data Links AutoCAD s Data Link feature creates the actual link to the spreadsheet, including what format should be used when a table is inserted, and which cells should be included in this connection. Once this association has been built, insert a table. In the Insert Table dialog box, choose to build the table from a Data Link instead of the usual option of starting with a blank table. Beyond this, a table created from a Data Link behaves somewhat like an x reference, updating when the Excel file changes; in addition, if you choose the appropriate settings, you can update the table and save the changes out to the Excel spreadsheet. This will minimize the errors that arise from having two lists. For our example, we will start with an Excel spreadsheet for a lighting plan. It contains a list of all the parts needed for this project. 1. Go to Tools>Data Links on the Ribbon and select the Data Link button. 2. Make sure that Preview is unchecked and click on Create a new Excel Data Link. 3. Give the data link a name, such as Lighting Plan. 4. Browse to the Excel file containing your item list. 5. In the New Excel Data Link dialog box, choose the settings that will govern this connection, including which cells to include and what formatting to use for the table. We will use the default settings. Then click OK. Click OK a second time to close the Data Link Manager. 6. Now, insert a new table by clicking on the Table button. For Insert Options, choose From a Data Link and select Lighting Plan from the dropdown menu. Click OK to insert into the drawing. 7. Selecting and then hovering over a cell will reveal two symbols: a lock and a coupled link. This shows that the cells are locked as well as linked to a spreadsheet. To unlock the cells, select the cells you wish to edit, rightclick, and choose Locking>Unlocked. 8. Edit the cells as necessary, including the addition of new columns/rows. When edits are finalized, lock the cells by selecting the modified cells, right clicking and choosing Locking>Content Locked. 9. To update the Excel spreadsheet, select the table, right click and choose Write Data Links to External Source. 5 of 10
Reuse information Palettes were introduced to AutoCAD 2004, and have developed further since then. Today we will focus on two of them in particular: Design Center and Tool Palettes. These palettes give us access to existing drawing objects. Design Center The first palette, Design Center, provides access to various styles (e.g., Text, Dimension, etc.) as well as layers with their corresponding properties, linetypes, and even x refs. Design Center is found at View>Palettes on the Ribbon; you can also toggle it on by typing Ctrl+2. Design Center allows you to look inside a drawing, even close drawings, to find styles, x references, layers, and blocks that you might want to use in your current drawing. To use this tool, navigate to the drawing containing the style or drawing object you want to use. On the left side of this palette you will be able to point to the object category within the drawing of interest. On the right side, you will have access to all the objects in that category. To add a drawing object to the current drawing, simply double click on the icon and it will be introduced to the new file. Use this tool to eliminate the re creation of styles and layers, or locating occasionally used blocks. Tool Palettes As with the first palette, Tool Palettes can be accessed from View>Palettes on the Ribbon, or by typing the shortcut Ctrl+3. The Tool Palettes are a series of tabs which allow you to sort and store blocks and other tools. Any tool you add to these palettes is available in any drawing, unlike styles or most other features that are on a per drawing basis. To add any tool to your current drawing, find the tool and click on it once; then place it in the drawing. 6 of 10
You can create new tabs per your needs and add blocks or command by first selecting them once, and then dragging the linework (NOT the grips) into the palette. Most companies have large directories of blocks for all different purposes. The Tool Palettes are not intended to replace this, but to supplement it; use these palettes to store the most commonly blocks. To add a block to the Tool Palettes, the block must be part of a saved drawing, and the path of that drawing must remain the same for the tool to function. Use palettes to store commands such as hatches. When you add a hatch pattern to the Tool Palettes, it retains not only the Hatch command, but also the hatch patter, scale, layer (including layer properties) and object properties. Storing your commonly used hatches here will save time when filling in areas on a construction plan. Modify properties of any tool by right clicking on it. This will open a small dialog box which allows you to change the objects name, properties, layer, etc. You can also use this to repair broken paths to blocks when their source drawings have changed. Additional tools Multi leaders Building on the leader tool available in AutoCAD for several versions, the 2009 release allows you to create multi leaders which allow you to point one call out to multiple instances. Multileaders use their own styles, which include leader appearance, text height, and attachment type (text or block at the end of the leader). Use the Multi leader button to create leaders the same as the past. The new step is adding additional leaders to the same callout; use the Add Leader button (leader with + sign) and add as many leaders as necessary. Easily remove individual leaders by using the Remove Leader button (leader with sign). Once you have completed the layout of leaders, use the Align Leaders button to align a series of multi leaders. This command will prompt you to select the leaders to align, and the leader that should be held. The command then allows you to choose the angle to line up all multi leaders neatly. 7 of 10
MText Editor The improved MText Editor enables you to have many of the word processing features common to Microsoft Office inside of AutoCAD. Anytime you are laying out or editing MText, the special MText Editor will open as a special tab on the Ribbon panel. Options on this panel include text justification, styles, text height, paragraph settings. The newest feature inside the MText Editor is the ability to split a large text object into columns. Press the Columns buttons and choose Dynamic Columns>Auto Height. This column setting provides the most automation of columns. You set the height limit of the first column and succeeding columns are automatically created. You can use the manual option to individually control the column heights. Viewport Layer controls One of the most frustrating challenges of producing the finished set of documents is showing the same object differently in two places. We often come across this situation when showing existing equipment with the proposed modifications. While the emphasis of one viewport or layout may be what the situation is currently, it is common practice to display existing objects in some sort of grayscale when showing proposed designs. Using the Viewport layer controls you can accomplish just this. When in an active viewport, if you open the Layer Properties Manager, additional columns will appear for VP properties (color, linetype, lineweight). This gives you the flexibility to draft the existing model and display it in typical colors, but then gray it out in viewports where it serves as a background. Layers modified in this way (as well as the specific properties altered) will show up with teal shading. 8 of 10
In the example to the right, the existing pipes are shown without overrides in the upper viewport, but have been modified with viewport layer controls to display as gray in the lower viewport. Find & Replace Throughout the design of any project, changes are expected. How these are effected results on gained or lost productivity. One of the simple tasks that can add up during a project is updating text, whether it be dates or project names, in the title block or in model space. A new tool works similar to the find function in Word, finding a specific word or phrase with the option to replace it and saving you time. 1. Go to the Annotate Ribbon Tab, and expand the Text panel. Type in the desired wording on the Find text line, and click on the search button. 2. This will open the Find and Replace dialog box. Choose Replace All to replace the desired wording through the drawing. You can also click on Find to find the next instance of that particular phrase and zoom right to it. 3. Click on the blue down arrow at the lower left hand corner to see the settings controlling the search limits. Here you can choose which annotation types will be searched as well as where the search will be performed. Conclusion The tools and commands I covered today are mostly new ways to do old tricks a little bit more efficiently and accurately. I hope you have found these tools helpful. To learn about more time saving tools, check out the New Feature Workshop that can be found on the Help pull down menu. Thanks for attending. 9 of 10
2008 KETIV Technologies of California, Inc. All rights reserved. About KETIV Technologies KETIV Technologies is a leading Autodesk solutions provider with 25 years experience delivering CAD software and services. KETIV s team of industry experts increase the profitability of engineering services companies by helping them simplify the process of conceptualization, design and production. KETIV serves the manufacturing, plant and civil engineering industries. For more information, visit www.ketivtech.com or call 866.465.3848. 10 of 10