Michael’s Corner

Michael's Corner is a monthly publication written by Michael E. Beall, Autodesk Authorized Author and peripatetic AutoCAD trainer. Michael travels all over the USA, bringing his fantastic experience and great understanding of AutoCAD to his clients. Michael's Corner brings together many of the tips, tricks and methods developed during these training sessions for the benefit of all users.

Michael's Corner provides something for every AutoCAD user. Every month, a number of articles cover a wide range of topics, suitable for users at all levels, including "The Basics" for those just starting out. Essentially, the aim of Michael's Corner is to help all AutoCAD users work smarter and faster.

This month…

From the Vault

Originally published June 2003

Saving Named Views

Even though you can return to the 10 previous displays with Zoom/Previous, it may be more advantageous to save a specific display of your drawing by name. If, for example, you are responsible for a plant layout and find that there are certain areas on that drawing to which you return frequently, save the display of that area by name using the View command.

The most efficient approach is to zoom into the specific area and choose Named Views from the Standard toolbar if you are using pre-A2004 (in AutoCAD 2004 it was dropped from the Standard toolbar so you will need to enter V at the Command line or choose View/Named Views from the pulldown menus).

In the View dialog box, click on the New button to open the New View dialog box. In the View name field, enter the name of the view, then click OK. Note: You are not saving the image or creating a file. AutoCAD effectively takes the X,Y coordinates of the lower left and upper right corners of the screen and puts them in a "shoebox" and labels it with the view name. You can have as many named views as you would like per drawing. After working in the drawing and changing your display, when you return to the View dialog, select the named view, click Set Current, then OK, AutoCAD sets the X,Y coordinates for the display corners to those that were current when you saved the view (the ones from the "shoebox" with that name).

Idea: Save a named view in Model space (such as a 3D view), then switch to a viewport in a Layout and restore the named view in that viewport.

Tip: You can plot a named view!

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