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Michael’s Corner - May 2013

Shedding a Little Light on Things

The sunny month of May is when a young person's mind turns to improving their AutoCAD skills—or did I get that wrong? Anyway, whatever your intentions this month, Michael's Corner brings you another generous helping of tips, trick and useful insights. Michael has been investigating 3D tools and he brings you some useful pointers that will help make your 3D drafting more efficient.

One of the reasons I like publishing Michael's Corner each month is that, despite having used AutoCAD for over 25 years, I learn something new every month, which just goes to show that you can probably never know everything about this wonderful bit of software. Of course there is also more to learn every year when new features are added. One of the great "under the radar" features in AutoCAD 2014 is the object selection preview when using implied windows. Such a small feature that the publicity material barely mentioned it but I often find that it's these small changes that make the biggest difference to the efficiency of my work. Michael gives us a quick overview of this new feature—probably my favourite of AutoCAD 2014.

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Tip of the Day

Command line in a window (F2)

The command line can be very useful, especially for beginners because AutoCAD often gives useful prompts which helps when learning how to use some of the more complicated commands. The command line is also used by AutoCAD to report information back to the user, but sometimes that information may run to several lines of text, and disappear from view. A good example of this is the Distance command (you can run this from the keyboard by typing DIST). The problem is that by default, the command line is only two lines high and so if you use the Distance command, you don't even see the distance reported to the command line.

One way round this problem is to increase the depth of the command line to show more lines but this takes up valuable drawing area. A better solution is to display the command window using the F2 key on the keyboard.

As you can see above, the command window also allows you to scroll back through the command line so that you can review your recent drawing history.

Today's tip is by David Watson

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