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When I am not at work, hanging with buds, or watching football (Go Colts), I can ussually be found playing Xbox or PC games such as Starcraft or LOL. When I play games on the computer I tend to be very competitive. As a result, I own gaming input devices such as a gaming mouse or gamepad. However, these can also be used in AutoCAD to boost speed greatly. The mouse sitting at my desk is a Cyborg RAT 7, dubbed the transforer mouse. Using only my mouse I can switch between four different layers, and activate 8 different commands all without ever touching the keyboard or leaving the model space. Gamepads let you have more accessible hotkeys. No matter how fast you are at moving your cursor or typing in a command, hotkeys set up on a mouse or pad are quicker! Hope you enjoy this tip and that it will help speed up your drafting!

I'm pretty fluent with excel the thing is though, but I'm not as fluent as transferring into autocad. I've been working with Autocad on a regular basis now for about 6 months and am getting pretty fast with it but there are a couple of things with the tables that I haven't even been able to work with but would like to. FYI I have Autocad 2012. 1. First off is there anyway I can link my excel sheet to autocad and any changes I make it will automatically update the excel sheet in autocad? 2. We use blocks a lot as we do Fire Sprinkler and Fire alarm. When I use these blocks, instead of having to individually count each block on the drawing at the end when I'm tallying up the amount of heads, etc, is there a lisp program that will tally up each type of block on the drawing? For instance, if I have 200 sprinkler heads in the building, is there a way for me to link some type of counter to my table so it automatically updates the # of spinkler heads each time? 3. Is the tables to work with in Autocad far more troubling than just copying and pasting my excel file into Autocad? 4. I've changed my key Aliases, but I can't find how to change the F1 key? It is quite a bothersome as sometimes I hit it when I click esc, etc... I've figured how to change half the F keys but for some reason not F1 and a couple of the others. 5. Kind of like the same question with the counter but when we run our circuits, is there anyway to have a link of some what to account for the length of the circuit? 6. I've also tried creating my own line types but for whatever reason, I can not get the text that I'm putting in the line type to line up directly in the middle like I'm wanting. I would rather the drawing look nice than it to look sloppy. 7. Also whenever I edit my aliases for some reason if I open an old drawing it takes resets all my aliases is there anyway to correct that? I can't think of anymore off the top of my head at the moment, and I know these are kind of petty as they don't take to long to do but time is $ and anything that speeds up my work would help out tremondously. Thanks again!