3 Ways to Get Back! AutoCAD REVERT, UNDO, and OOPS: Tuesday Tips With Frank

[The AutoCAD Blog]

Today’s Tuesday Tip is really three tips in one, with all three sharing the same theme. They let you Get Back to where you… started (you thought I was going to say once belonged, didn’t you?) Sometimes our work doesn’t take us where we want, and we realize it’s best to start over, or as the Fab Four told us, it’s time to Get Back.

AutoCAD REVERT: Toss It and Start Over

The scenario: You have an existing drawing, and its design needs to be updated. There are various design options, and your job is to try them and decide on the best. You work for a while, try ideas, get stuck, get unstuck, work more, until you realize it’s just not going to work.

Yes, you could close the drawing, making sure that you don’t save it, then reopen it to start over. There are better options that will get you there quicker. The first is an Express Tool. It is called REVERT, and it does exactly what you might think. It tosses out all your edits and Gets Back to the state of the drawing when you opened it. It’s not in the Ribbon, so you’ll have to remember its name – unless you have the MENUBAR turned on.

I first wrote about the Express Tools found in the MENUBAR way back in 2018. There are more tools there than in the Ribbon. You can find REVERT there if you want.

There’s another way to revert your drawing back to its original state, and it works as a segue into my next topic. You can type in the full UNDO command, then B for Back, then accept the Y for Yes to accept the prompt to undo everything.

AutoCAD UNDO: Control Your Undo

Some of you may not be aware that UNDO is a full-fledged command with options. If you’re like most of us, you type U and pop the spacebar, or maybe use the Windows Ctrl-Z option or the little icon (and pulldown menu) in the QAT.

Let’s consider our design scenario again. This time, some of your initial design changes work perfectly, and you don’t want to lose them if you continue. In other words, a full REVERT or UNDO “Back” later on would remove things that you want to keep. But UNDO is still your friend here. Notice all the options available in the full command. I’ll be focusing here on one of them, but feel free to explore further in the help file.

You can use the “Mark” option to set a kind of bookmark of the current state of your drawing. You can set multiple, in fact. Later, when you do an UNDO “Back”, it will only go back until it finds the most recent Mark.

Once a Mark is encountered, it will be removed. If you have more than one Mark set, subsequent calls to UNDO “Back” will go to those. If you’re using the U <enter> method (which is actually UNDO <1>) and a Mark is encountered, you will be informed about it. Once all of your Marks are accessed and removed, running UNDO will Get Back to the beginning.

AutoCAD OOPS: Get Back the Erased

Back to our design scenario one more time. You work on an idea, get to the end, and decide against it, so you erase it all. You work on a different part of the design for a while, which is going to work great, but then you realize the stuff you deleted would now work in conjunction with your new design. You want to keep what you have, but also Get Back what you’ve deleted. Now what?

That’s where our last option comes in handy. It’s called OOPS. Yes, I’m serious here. As far as I know, it’s been in AutoCAD from the very beginning. It restores the last object, or set of objects, that were deleted by the last ERASE command. Just type it into the command line and press return, and your object or objects will return.

A word of warning, though, OOPS doesn’t work like UNDO does. It won’t keep going back in time restoring erasures. It’s a one-time deal. You can only Get Back the last object or objects that were erased.

And In the End…

I’ve got to hand it to myself. It was so tempting to fill this post with Beatles puns, but I was able to stick to the topic.

Using REVERT, UNDO, and OOPS, you can easily Get Back the last thing you erased, you can Get Back to a virtual bookmark in your design, or you can Get Back to where you started.

And now, I’ve Got a Feeling that I’m going to call my dog, Jo Jo over, we’ll Come Together, and I’ll drop all my pent-up puns on him. It will be just the… Two of Us.

More Tuesday Tips

Check out our whole Tuesday Tips series for ideas on how to make AutoCAD work for you. 

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