Categories

AutoCAD 2015 and AutoCAD LT 2015 Bible

The most comprehensive AutoCAD book around!

Troubleshooting problem drawings

The most obvious problem is that you can’t open a drawing. Here are some techniques to try:

Rename the drawing’s BAK (backup) file by changing its filename extension to .dwg and see if you can open that. Find any temporary files (auto.sv$ by default) and rename them with a DWG extension and try to open […]

How to stay up to date with AutoCAD

AutoCAD is a complex program and it’s crucial for your work. Obviously, the better you know how to use the program, the quicker and more accurate your drawings will be. This is where the importance of education comes in.

Education has two parts:

Learning more about the base AutoCAD features that you use, or could […]

Select all instances of a block

If you would like to see where all the instances of your comp2b block are, you can select them all using the Quick Select feature from the Properties palette. This is a great technique for troubleshooting your blocks.

Follow these steps:

Open the Properties palette. Click the Quick Select button to open the Quick Select […]

Get lots of information about your drawing–all in one place–with this command

How many objects are in your drawing?

What are the limits and the extents of your drawing?

What are the running object snaps?

What’s the current elevation setting?

Is FILL on or off?

What’s the current linetype?

How much free space does your hard drive have?

How much memory is free?

How many places do […]

Find all named objects in a drawing

For troubleshooting or collaborative purposes, you may need to know the named objects in your drawings, that is:

Blocks Dimension styles Layers Linetypes Materials Table styles Text styles UCSs Viewports (really viewport configurations) Views Plot styles (which you see only if you’re using named plot styles)

You can see all your named objects by using […]

Organize files in Windows to mimic the Today file listing

Some of you may remember the Today feature of AutoCAD 2002, which was a front-end window that allowed you to open existing files, create new files, and so on. One of its views was an alphabetical list of files, separated by the first letter of their name. Another was a listing by date.

Today quickly […]

Find where xrefs are hosted

Would you like to know in which drawings a specific file is used as an xref? Let’s say that you’re editing a drawing and you’re pretty sure that it’s used as an xref in some other drawings. Changing the drawing will change these other drawings, too.

Mai Ezzat of Egypt sent in this tip to […]