units

[Valerie]

Hello Everyone
My stupid questions for the week.
1 - When I start a new drawing is the only place I can set it to metric or imperial in the start from scratch window when I open Autocad?
2 - I have a drawing someone else made. When I dimension a line it says 5.0 How do I know if it's 5", 5mm, 5', 5m. If I do a distance check it says 5.0 but I still don't know 5 what. Where is centimeters?. How can I be sure something was created in either metric or imperial?.
Using 2002
Thanks
Val

[David Bethel]

In short - You cannot.

It could be lightyears or miles or kilometers for that matter. -David

[Mark Ruble]

This is not a stupid question at all Val. We use a lot of vendor drawings that was generated from unknown sources, so when a block says it is metric I just pull up our metric template and insert the block and then see if the dimensions have changed. I know our metric template is set to mm and this hasn't failed us so far, however I do understand what you are saying and I have no real answer for you.

[Spacepig]

On your desktop icon to run autocad, if you right click and go to the properties line it gives you the name of the file that runs autocad. You can however add extra bits of information after that to set up the default environment - for example mine reads
"C:\Program Files\Autodesk Architectural Desktop 3\acad.exe"
... if you add /t followed by a template file that you want to run as default, then that will be the one that runs - on the above example it would now read...
"C:\Program Files\Autodesk Architectural Desktop 3\acad.exe" /t s:\projects\database\mech\proto_bs
if the default template was the proto_bs.dwt - hope this helps

Best regards

Spacepig