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The AutoCAD Workbench, Final Edition

Fourteen year's worth of Michael's Corner has been completely updated for AutoCAD 2018 and is now available in the form of the AutoCAD Workbench, Final Edition. The book is available in spiral-bound paper or as a PDF. To find out more or to order a copy, visit Michael's CAD Trainer Guy site.

Michael’s Corner - October/November 2016

One-derful!!!

This month's Corner marks the end of an era. I've been running the CADTutor website for 20 years and for the last 14 of those I've been ably assisted in that endeavour by Michael Beall who has consistently provided content of the highest quality. Michael has written almost 600 articles for CADTutor in close to 150 monthly columns. If Autodesk are listening, they should probably give him a medal for services to AutoCAD. I'm constantly surprised and delighted by how generous people are when sharing information, wisdom and experience on the Web and Michael is a prime example of how Tim Berners-Lee hoped people would share their knowledge. Thank you Michael for all you've done for the CADTutor community.

So, for Michael's final corner we have articles on modifying the action of the F1 key, no less than 3 Power Tool articles, including tips on zooming with your mouse, background hatch colours and text frames for Mtext. As always, these articles are designed to help you work smarter, not harder. I hope you find them useful.

CADTutor itself is staying put and we have a few new things planned for 2017, so stay tuned. And don't forget that all of Michael's Corners are still available at CADTutor for your future reference.

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Tip of the Day

Auto-repeating Commands

Sometimes you need to repeat a command lots of times and it can be a bit tedious doing the usual Right-Click and Repeat… or even using the Enter () key on the keyboard. It would be really useful if you could just keep a command auto-repeating until you hit the Escape (Esc) key. Well, you can. All you need to do is make a small change to the CUI.

For example, say you want to draw lots of circles and have the circle command auto-repeat so that you can just pick center, radius, center, radius etc. Here's what you do:

1. Select ViewToolbars… from the pull-down menu to display the CUI dialogue box.
2. In the "Customizations in All CUI Files" section, click on "Toolbars" and then "Draw" to reveal the Draw commands, and then click "Circle".
3. The Properties area now changes to display the Circle button properties and under the "Macro" heading, you will see the macro used to start the Circle command. By default, this macro is: ^C^C_circle. To cause the Circle command to auto-repeat, simply add a "*" before the existing macro. Once edited, your macro should look like this: *^C^C_circle.
4. Now click the "OK" button to save and return to the drawing.

Try the circle command and see what happens.

This technique can be used with most commands. For example, if you are doing a lot of dimensioning, you could auto-repeat the Linear Dimension command so that you can draw all your dimensions without breaking stride.

Today's tip is by fuccaro

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