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Michael’s Corner - February/March 2014

There He Is, Out Standing in His Field

Here in the UK, we're obsessed with the weather; our national pastime is talking about it. Usually, it's just a case of making conversation but not at the moment. We've just had the wettest January since records began, parts of southern England are under water and there seems to be no end in sight.

Fortunately, there's nothing wet about this month's Corner. Michael demonstrates a number of ways to keep you DRY (Don't Repeat Yourself). Need to run a script on a regular basis? Keep it simple and do so with a single click. Want to know how to write a script to avoid repetitive tasks? Michael's got that covered too. Do you find yourself repeating drawing setup tasks? Why not use ACADDOC.LSP? Yep, Michael gets seriously efficient this month.

In addition to all of this, there's also some neat tips and tricks for beginners (or anyone who has ever wondered what the Layer Previous command does).

And finally, I can't end this month's introduction without mentioning Michael Beall's fantastic achievement at Autodesk University in December. Many congratulations to him on receiving the AU Speaker award for the Hands-on Lab category. Once again proving that here at CADTutor, we only provide you with the best there is. Watch out for the next Corner at the beginning of April, when we hope the rain will have stopped.

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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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