interestingengineering.com: This week, we polled our Q&A Community to discover which programs everyday engineers were using the most. Other than Microsoft Excel, which we already have an extensive shortcuts list about, AutoCAD was next in line. For all the AutoCAD users out there, from new to expert, here are the top 50 AutoCAD tricks, commands, and shortcuts from across the web!
4 comments:
I love that there is an “overkill” command, it is not as funny as “oops,” but I actually think I am going to use that one. I have generally avoided these AutoCAD tip articles because I just assumed articles about using software would be confusing to read, but I think this one was well set up. I think that the author gave clear and concise explanations for all of the commands. I particularly liked some of the very simple commands, like “spell.” I am certain that I will be using that command. I know that I am only going to be able to remember a few new commands at a time. Plus, I would not have a reason to use most of these in my drafting now. But it is helpful to get a sense of how I could be using CAD more efficiently in the future, and maybe apply more of these command later.
So due to the fact that I'm still getting used to AutoCAD I find this list to be extremely useful. I'm not sure exactly when I would use some of these shortcuts, there were some that seem incredibly useful. One of the most useful ones that was that of the command of SAVEALL, I honestly kinda slapped myself a bit when I read that not knowing why I didn't try to type that in before. I also really like the OPPS command because there are often times that I delete things and have to go through all other commands I have done since that deletion including all of the paning and zooming I have done, to have a command that just circumvents that is pretty cool. The other command that I felt would be a interesting and useful one to use would be DIMBASELINE, this is mostly due to the fact that making clean organized dims is still on the list of things that I'm trying to work on. In short a cool article that I fully intend to bookmark for later use.
I remember being given a list of all short cuts and command lines when I was first learning how to use AutoCAD (Thank you engineering parents!). And honestly, it was kind of a lot. AutoCAD is notorious for giving you 101 different ways of achieving what you want. Memorizing top 50’s and shortcuts does substantially speed up the process and just keeping articles like this on hand for troubleshooting is always a great idea. However, the vast majority of people will read this once and then “throw it away” (hard to do with a computer). And every command on this list will be good to know at some point. OVERKILL is wonderful for laser cutting (no one likes repeats). SPELL will personally be a godsend. QLATTCH will probably be one of my favorites as well (I hate dealing with leader lines). But beyond those three, I will not remember the commands in my daily use. I have already found a way around what most of these do (it’s less efficient, but it works) and I am entrenched in my ways. But, I’ll keep the article in my “I have no clue what I’m doing” bookmark folder for the one time in my life when I will need the signal BATTMAN (or change the order and properties of block definitions) in the future.
Halfway through reading this list I chuckled because I never thought I would be reading an article about an engineering drawing program, let alone be currently enrolled in an AutoCAD class- I did not even know what it was before attending this school. Now here I am.I had no prior experience with AutoCAD, so I was starting right at the beginning. As with any new skill, once you learn the basics there are shortcuts that you can take, but you can not necessarily take shortcuts to mastery first. In our Freshmen AutoCAD class we just learned about veiwports and their function. If I had read this article last week, the shortcut would have been useless to me because I lacked that basic foundation. I feel like that illustrates a good point that no matter how extensive these little cheat sheets are they are useless without a solid foundation to place them upon.
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