Michael's Corner

July Celebrations! - July 2010

Happy 234th birthday, USA! (Well, we have to celebrate something since it won't be a soccer trophy!)

I had another totally great time in Guam again last month! Here's my team of students from the AutoCAD 2010 Update course I presented for New Horizons Computer Learning Center.

As many of you know, my training sessions are fertile ground for new articles and Guam was no exception. We were all lamenting about the "exploded box" icon for Explode that was introduced in AutoCAD 2009, so I told the guys I would show 'em how to put the firecracker back on the Explode button.

Here's what's in store for July 2010:

…Put the (4th of July) firecracker back on the Explode button
…Including ‘Prompt for Rotate’ in Dynamic Block with multiple insertion points
…‘Single’ option for Copy
…Multiple Points in the Distance option of Measuregeom

And if you have yet to do so, you can order The AutoCAD Workbench from my website using PayPal or download the order form.

The AutoCAD® Workbench is Now Shipping! - June 2010

It is our collective pleasure to announce that, by the time of the posting of this month's Michael's Corner, The AutoCAD Workbench is on its way to dozens of you! Those of you who have already sent in payment will be first to receive your copy. I'm really pleased with how it turned out and I hope you are, as well. Over 200 pages, 300+ "How To" exercises, and fully indexed. I think the most humbling emails I received was from a reader in Sao Paulo who said he could now dispense with the loose-leaf copies he had made of assorted articles, now that it was all going to be in one volume!

Download the Order Form which has all the relevant information for purchasing either the book, the .PDF, or a combination of both. You will also find options to use PayPal on the Workbench page of my website.

This month's articles are included in The AutoCAD Workbench, so order your copy today!

…Adding a Sub-Panel to a panel on the Ribbon
…PDF Underlay layers
…Tab through commands and variables
…The BLOCK and INSERT commands

And I want to give a shout out to my class at NeoCon, too. On Wednesday, June 16th I will be presenting my 8th annual ‘AutoCAD Toolbelt’ session at the NeoCon Worlds Trade Fair at the Merchandise Mart in Chicago. I'm looking forward to another great class of very appreciative professionals, some of whom are kind enough to sign up each year!

More AutoCAD® 2011 Insights and some Customizing for Fun - May 2010

AutoCAD 2011 really does bring some luster to the productivity features. I'm having a grand time updating the book with the current version because I'm discovering the subtle differences between A2011, and the previous Ribbon-based versions of A2009 and A2010. And I'm always excited when a customer has a question in training that requires some customizing. This month you'll learn…

…How to add a user-defined button (and an image) to the Quick Access Toolbar
…Some of the cool new selection features introduced to the A2011 shortcut menu
…How to display a toolbar WITH the Ribbon in A2011
…Some fundamentals of the Multiline Text (Mtext) command

Hopefully these tips and insights will enable you to get your job done more quickly so you can get out and enjoy this fabulous Spring weather!

AutoCAD® 2011 Hot Spots - April 2010

Of the dozens of software titles produced by Autodesk, I am quite delighted to be fluent exclusively on the flagship of AutoCAD®. The first version I trained on was Release 10… which was also the first version in which they thought it would be a good idea to alphabetize the layers. Nice.

Guri Stark, (Vice President, AutoCAD & Platform products) mentioned during our ‘Welcome to the Official Launch of AutoCAD 2011’ session that AutoCAD 2011 is their Silver Anniversary version - their 25th product release. From where I sit, it's another fabulous release and has several features that my primary customer base - contract furniture dealerships and corporate Facility Planning departments - will find extremely helpful. My ‘Top Three’ that I'm presenting this month include:

…An introduction to the Hatch improvements
…The now-intuitive process of polyline editing
…The (hopefully last) revision of the process of selection cycling

Stay tuned, I think AutoCAD 2011 is going to be a great ride.

AutoCAD® 2011 - Ready When You Are! - March 2010

Dateline March 25, 2010: As many of you may have suspected, AutoCAD® 2011 was officially released today and it was a humbling experience to be seated among Autodesk management and the AutoCAD Development teams at the live webcast of the official launch.

Several of us from the social network of AutoCAD bloggers and authors were hosted by Autodesk in San Francisco in recognition of our enthusiasm for this flagship product. Please be advised: AutoCAD® and it's branded products - AutoCAD LT, AutoCAD Architecture, AutoCAD Civil 3D, AutoCAD Inventor Suites, AutoCAD Map 3D, AutoCAD Mechanical, & AutoCAD MEP - are alive and extremely well.

In the months ahead, I will have articles in Michael's Corner covering some of the wonderful new productivity features found in AutoCAD 2011 and AutoCAD 2011 LT.

"Michael's Corner, 7 Years of AutoCAD Tips & Insights": Update. I have contacted a printer and it looks like I'm still on track to have this title available by June, just in time for NeoCon! I will be working closely with the CADTutor administrator, David Watson, to coordinate the logistics of making the book available to all of you, so stay tuned!

Taking a look at what I just wrote, it looks like customizing is once again the order of the day. Ribbons, tool palettes, and workspaces are the power that drives our productivity… and I've also answered that niggling question about the difference between Off and Freeze that you've always wanted to ask.

Blessings to one and all for a glorious new season.

Customizing for Fun & Profit - February 2010

OK, so the ‘Profit’ would be the benefit of being more productive, rather than financial remuneration. Nonetheless, that's what I try to do in these articles; make you more productive so you increase (profit) in your personal time and reduce your overtime.

The main article is a bit code-heavy, but I have posted the necessary files out on my website so you won't have to start from scratch and with a minimal amount of effort can begin using the attributed, automatically incrementing block.

Other insights you will learn about this month include:

…Automating your favorite Workspace using a switch when you launch AutoCAD from the icon
…How to change the width of Mtext that was transferred to Paper space using CHSPACE
…The importance of the Support File Search Path

By the way, the compilation of over 300 tips from Michael's Corner is coming along nicely and I'm still hoping for a June 2010 publish date. All subscribers will get an email when the book becomes available. If you have yet to subscribe, just click the link over on the left panel.

New Stuff for the New Year! - January 2010

This year I'm going to be taking on some new projects. For one, I'm going to become fundamentally literate in Revit so that I can allay the fears of my core customers. Contrary to what you may hear from some, it cannot cure world hunger and it does have a specific focus and may not be for every application. I may even have an article or two this year to pass along what I find out.

I'm also expecting to provide training on another product that I'm very excited about that has to do with the contract furniture industry, but I'm not at liberty to discuss that at this time, so stay tuned.

And finally, I hope to finish the book compiling the last 7 years of Michael's Corner (Oh, please, God). Not sure what format this will take - definitely an eBook for starters - so I have quite a bit on my plate for the next few months.

What you have before you is…

…Referencing a PDF Underlay
…Adding another tool to an existing Panel on the Ribbon
…AutoCAD Timesavers to speed up your system that I learned at Autodesk University
…Status Bar tidbits

I hope this New Year will be your best year ever!

...and December Makes Seven - December 2009

By the time this is posted, Autodesk University 2009 will be in the books and several thousand users of Autodesk products will be on sensory overload, myself included. Over the next few months I'll be sure to pass along some of the "Best Bets" that I came away with from the sessions I attended. I am also considering including occasional coverage on Revit since so many of my customers have encountered firms providing and requesting Revit-generated drawings.

As is often the case, my topics this month lean heavily upon the requests, comments, and encounters of those customers, and this month they include:

…Adding a drop-down list of 3D commands to the Quick Access Toolbar
…Creating a customized hatch pattern with the Express Tools command, ‘Superhatch’
…An important follow-up to the September coverage of DIMASSOC
…The wisdom of using the Rectangle command rather than Pline to create& the lowly rectangle

And so this December completes the 7th year of Michael's Corner. Hopefully, I can have a book in your hands - either an eBook or printed media - before summertime that contains the last seven years of tips and insights, updated to AutoCAD 2010. That's my goal this year, so stay tuned.

Blessings to one and all for a very Merry Christmas and a joyful and exciting New Year!

Very Thankful - November 2009

The United States celebrates Thanksgiving this month (the last Thursday of the month), so I just wanted to say thank you from myself (in Kentucky) and the CADTutor staff (in England), for your continued interest and encouragement to us; we do appreciate your patronage. Autodesk University will be upon us in no time (and may be going on when this column sees the light of day), and I'm getting pretty excited.

This month I'm sharing with you a couple topics that will be in my AU Lab regarding the AutoCAD 2010 Quick Access Toolbar and Workspaces. I'm also adding a couple editing tips such as suppressing that giant Mtext Editor when you edit Mtext and the fundamentals of changing dimensions with the grips.

…and I would love to hear from you if you're cooking your Thanksgiving turkey by some method other than an oven!

Burning Cake - October 2009

The light from the bonfire we'll be having later this month out in the back pasture will marginally resemble the glow from the 56 candles I'm sure my family will try to put on my cake in a few days (traditional Columbus Day, thank you). Apart from being my birthday month though, I just love October and the beginning of the Autumn season.

As I was developing the opening article on Multiline Attributes, I bumped into a site that contains lots of AutoCAD blocks for your AEC projects. www.arcat.com/details/cad_details.shtml. There's also an FTP site that Autodesk maintains where you will find additional blocks, although navigation through this site is a bit less organized. ftp://image.autodesk.com

This month in Michael's Corner I'm covering…
…Adding a Multiline Attribute to an Existing Block - updated from January 2007 to include Multiline Attributes.
…Using Paste to Original Coordinates from the Shortcut menu.
…How to Add Another Vertex to a Polyline.
…Sharing Your Content on Autodesk Seek.

Enjoy your S'mores this month!