Michael's Corner

Oh-One/One-Two

I'm sure there's a math major out there that could make something clever out of that sequence – like the next pair would be Two-Three – and some probably want to state it as 'Zero-One'. Bottom line, the point of the exercise was accomplished: Get you thinking about your new year, 2012!

To that end, this month has some tips I picked up at Autodesk University – although I did teach my Hands-On lab twice (shown here, photo courtesy of H. Hernandez, Southwest Airlines), I did attend several sessions – as well as a few from my customers, to wit…

…Fun with AutoCAD 2012 Applications from Autodesk Exchange
…Make a Dynamic Block by Adding a Rotation Parameter
…The somewhat inconspicuous View controls in A2012
…Random productivity features from my customers

Of course, I hope this finds you back on track, several days into the New Year, and looking forward to all that it has in store.

Forward and onward into the 10th year of Michael's Corner!

Fun Winter Memories

Hopefully this finds you all looking forward to a fun Christmas season! Be it on the beach sunning and swimming or on the mountain trails skiing and schussing, winter activities are always fun. I think my favorite snow-related memory is here at home in Kentucky, after a pretty good snowfall, sledding down our steps, down the front yard, across the road, down the hill, then rolling off before getting to the creek at the bottom. The walk back, however…

On the AutoCAD front, perhaps you will find something in this month's offerings (presents?) that you will remember and use to make you a wee bit more productive, get the job done sooner, and get to spend more time at home! Consider the following…

…How to use the Revolve command to create a Surface Model
…Features of the Navigation Bar that you may actually be able to implement
…A more efficient way of toggling on and off Isolated objects
…Docking your windows to be more productive, especially when checking your drawing

My schedule at the end of December will be not unlike Santa as he jets around the planet; Guam one week and New York City the next. Nonetheless, I'm sure it will be a wonderful - and memorable - adventure. My lovely bride of 25 years keeps telling me to "Enjoy the Moment". Good advice to one and all.

Blessings to you all for a delightful Christmas season and a great New Year!

From Autodesk University, to Folsom Prison, to Guam!

My travel schedule gets pretty wacky (not as wacky as Shaan's, of course), but this is probably the most exciting sequence of events and locations I've had in awhile. At Autodesk University, I'll be presenting The AutoCAD Toolbelt lab twice, the following week I have been invited to do some AutoCAD training at Folsom Prison (stay tuned to Michael's Corner for more on how that goes!), then I'll be heading down to Guam again to train customers of the New Horizons Learning Center. Ee-Hah!

This month I'll be covering the following topics of interest expressed by folks in my recent training sessions…

Mapping materials to 3D furniture blocks comprised of 3D faces
Adding a button to the Quick Access Toolbar that will reload all Xrefs at once
Putting the workspace name back on the Workspace Switching icon on the A2012 Status bar
Subtleties of the Join command

Really looking forward to presenting at Autodesk University again, as we learn to Export a customized tab from the Ribbon. After AU, I'll be posting the presentation on my Home page, next to the ones from the previous 2 years.

Ah, and a Happy Thanksgiving to one and all.

Colorful Settings

Not quite sure how I ended up with 3 out of 4 articles involving color, but that's how it turned out. I then discovered that I had not been specific about the type of text object that works best with a Dynamic Block (covered in Michael's Corner, August 2011), so I covered the creating of an attribute so the Dynamic Block will be a wee bit more effective.

So, for my birthday month (October 12th, thank you), here's what I have in store:

…Creating a button on the Quick Access Toolbar to load your favorite linetypes automatically
…Follow-up on the stretching Dynamic Block and how to create an Attribute Definition
…The curious case of a transparent Command line
…How to color new dual-element Command line in AutoCAD 2012

I'll be turning in the content for my AutoCAD University labs soon, so stay tuned for the posting of that workbook on my Home page in December.

Hope your October is great!

Settings & Information

As I reviewed the content for this month, I realized that 3 of the four articles cover running some type of inquiry on a drawing, and the other one shows you how to customize the Osnap setting for quicker access.

Curiously, that's what a significant percentage of your day probably boils down to: Queries, the result of which then enable you to respond appropriately, and settings which enable a quicker response. So here's what I have for you this month:

…Customizing the QAT for quicker Osnap changes
…Configuring Quick Select to use a Wildcard search for text
…Adding the Area property to Quick Properties when selecting a Hatch
…Using Bcount to automatically tally up all your blocks

The cooler evenings make for much more pleasant grilling these days. Hopefully these insights will give you a wee bit more time to experiment with a new recipe, or whatever you may find to do with all that extra time!

Happy Fall to one and all!

Hot Fun

Some of you are filling in the rest of the song, "…in the summertime", the 1969 hit single recorded by Sly & the Family Stone. As I'm writing this, I'm beginning to appreciate — dare I say 'long for' — the oft-quoted "dry heat" of Phoenix, after spending time in the Caribbean, Florida, and now this curious hot spell we've had here in Kentucky the last several weeks.

Customizing takes the first three spots this month as I looked back over some of the requests I received from my customers recently.

…Creating a dynamic block that can be sized (using a Linear parameter) to accommodate the text string
…Adding a command to an existing drop-down list on the Ribbon
…Organizing the position of the columns in the Layer Properties Manager
…Using the 'Hold' feature in Layer Walk

Hopefully these will make your summertime a bit more productive!

Software Fireworks!

A portion of this month's content was written while I was down in the Dutch Caribbean presenting training for the UTS Training & Development Center in St. Maarten. What a joy and a blessing to be invited down there and the hospitality shown to me by the Center's managers, David & Christine McGregor was positively delightful. My 36 students were pretty great, too, I must say.

This month I wanted to tackle the new AutoCAD 2012 Array feature and at least give you some starting points. So in the fashion of the 4th of July, I'll light the ‘fuse of interest’, and my suspicion is you will all have your own colorful ideas on how to apply these insights:

…Creating and adjusting an Associative rectangular array
…Using the multifunction grips and the contextual tab to edit the Associative array
…Mechanics of editing a source object in an Associative array
…Editing stacked fractions in Mtext (I know, totally random)

I sure hope you all have as much fun with these tips as I did discovering them, and I hope you have a safe summer holiday!

Summer Dance

It's been awhile since Donna and I went dancing, but I'm hoping this finds you all looking forward to a drier summer - at least here in the midwest of the USA - and feel compelled to just up and dance a jig to celebrate!

I want to thank David, too, for stepping in and bringing some excellent insights "for Month 101" of Michael's Corner. I was absolutely elated to see his extensive coverage on Excel Data in AutoCAD! That is a topic I have been woefully ignorant about, so hopefully you also feel much more empowered and able to address that topic when it arises.

We'll begin the summer with a customer request and take a look at a few more A2012 entries.

…New UCS Icon power features in A2012
…How to rotate text objects around their insertion point using an Express tool
…How to launch A2012 - or any program - faster by assigning a hot key and a switch
…New Fillet and Chamfer previews in A2012

Thanks again to all of you for your ongoing support and encouragement to the CADTutor team!

Data Links and New Tools

This month I have the great pleasure of standing in for Michael while he takes a well-earned rest after delivering his 100th Corner last month. Never fear, Michael will be back next month, but in the meantime I have a few things you might find interesting.

We all work with data and commonly, we need to integrate this data with our AutoCAD drawings. This month I demonstrate how to make a data link between AutoCAD and Microsoft Excel and how to display your spreadsheets in an AutoCAD table.

In other articles, I'm covering a few things new to AutoCAD 2011 and 2012 that you may have missed but should know about because they are great for productivity.

The 100th Michael's Corner: Thank You!

Who knew, back in 2002 when Professor David Watson invited me to contribute to CADTutor, that there would still be an audience 100 months later. I am humbled and honored to still be considered a valuable resource for improving your AutoCAD productivity.

Although the celebration in London this month would have been wonderful, the timing wasn't quite right (and I'm still not sure when I'm going to use that round-trip ticket I have, so stay tuned).

Nonetheless, here are a few of the things I was preparing for that event.

…How to add button to the Quick Access Toolbar for a unique Viewpoint position
…The Hatch Transparency two-step
…A quicker way to make a New Layer using the QAT
…Adding the Object Hide and Isolation commands to the QAT
…And a few other random insights that I have been gathering

And yes, AutoCAD 2012 is now available, so once I work with it a bit more, I'll get back to you on what I find under the hood (or in the trunk with the spare tire!).