AutoCAD is a typical Windows graphics program that makes use of menus, toolbars, Ribbon panels, and palettes. If you've used other graphics programs, you'll see at least a few familiar tools.

One of the first things you'll want to learn is how to manipulate your views. The Zoom command is a common tool in graphics programs.

Nothing is more frustrating than having a power failure cause you to lose hours of work. It's a good idea to save your work frequently. AutoCAD offers an autosave feature that can be a lifesaver if you happen to forget to save your files.

As with other Windows programs, you can have multiple files open and exchange data between them.

One of the most basic skills you need to learn is how to indicate exact distances through the keyboard. AutoCAD uses a simple annotation system to indicate distance and direction.

AutoCAD's cursor changes its shape depending on the command that is currently active. These different cursor modes can give you a clue regarding what you should be doing.

Grips are small squares that appear at key points on the object when they're selected. These grips offer a powerful way to edit objects.

Besides grips, objects display their dimensional properties when selected. These dimensional properties can be edited to change an object's shape.

AutoCAD's Help window is thorough in its coverage of AutoCAD's features. New and experienced users alike can often find answers to their questions thorough the Help window, so it pays to become familiar with it.

AutoCAD offers a Text Window that keeps a running account of the commands you use. This can be helpful in retrieving input that you've entered when constructing your drawing.

The Properties palette is one of the most useful sources for drawing information. Not only does it list the properties of an object, it also lets you change the shape, color, and other properties of objects.

A blank AutoCAD drawing offers few clues about the size of the area you're working with, but you can get a rough idea of the area shown in the AutoCAD window.

To use AutoCAD effectively, you'll want to know how the different tools work together to achieve an effect. The drawing process often involves many cycles of adding objects and then editing them.

If you've ever had to draw a precise sketch with just a pencil and pad, you've probably used a set of lightly drawn guidelines to lay out your drawing first. You do the same thing in AutoCAD, but instead of lightly drawn guidelines, you can use any object you want. In AutoCAD, objects are easily modified or deleted, so you don't have to be as careful when adding guidelines.

The main reason for using AutoCAD is to produce precision technical drawings. AutoCAD offers many tools to help you produce a drawing with the precision you need.

If you have a symbol that you use often in a drawing, you can draw it once and then turn it into an AutoCAD block. A block can be placed in a drawing multiple times in any location, like a rubber stamp. Blocks are stored in a drawing as a block definition, which can be called up at any time.

Once you've created a block, it isn't set in stone. One of the features of a block is that you can change the block definition, and all the copies of the block are updated to the new definition.

In some cases, you'll want to create a block that is dependent on the drawing scale. You can create a block that adjusts itself to the scale of your drawing through the annotation scale feature. When the annotation scale feature is turned on for a block, the block can be set to appear at the correct size depending on the scale of your drawing.

Blocks can be used as a tool to group objects together, but blocks can be too rigid for some grouping applications. AutoCAD offers groups, which are collections of objects that are similar to blocks but aren't as rigidly defined.

Layers are perhaps the most powerful feature in AutoCAD. They help to keep drawings well organized and they give you control over the visibility of objects. They also let you control the appearance of your drawing by setting colors, lineweights, and linetypes.

When a drawing becomes dense with information, it can be difficult to edit. If you've organized your drawing using layers, you can reduce the complexity of a drawing by turning off layers that aren't important to your current session.

At times, you may want a record of the layers or blocks in your drawing. You can create a list of layers using the log file feature in AutoCAD.

If you find that you're using the same settings when you create a new drawing file, you can set up an existing file the way you like and save it as a template. You can then use your saved template for any new drawings you create.

Many tools in AutoCAD allow you to create multiple copies. The Array command offers a way to create circular copies or row and column copies.

When laying down simple line work, you'll use a few tools frequently. The exercises in the early part of this book showed you some of these commonly used tools.

AutoCAD offers some tools that allow you to find an exact distance along a curve.

You can accurately adjust the length of a line or arc in AutoCAD using a single command.

You can save a lot of time by reusing parts of drawings. The Wblock command can help.

Technical drawings are often made up of repetitive parts that are drawn over and over. AutoCAD makes quick work of repetitive elements in a drawing, as shown in the first part of this chapter.

Understanding the way the AutoCAD display works can save you time, especially in a complex drawing.

Patterns can convey a lot of information at a glance. You can show the material of an object, or you can indicate a type of view, like a cross section, by applying hatch patterns.

The boundary hatch options give you control over the way hatch patterns fill an enclosed area.

External references are drawing files that you've attached to the current drawing to include as part of the drawing. Because external references aren't part of the current file, they can be worked on at the same time as the referencing file.

Unlike other types of documents, AutoCAD drawings can end up on nearly any size sheet of paper. To accommodate the range of paper sizes, the AutoCAD plotter settings are fairly extensive and give you a high level of control over your output.

The Layout tabs in AutoCAD offer a way to let you set up how a drawing will be plotted. You can think of the Layout tabs as a kind of paste-up area for your drawings.

Typically, AutoCAD will use the Windows system printer as an output device, but often you will find that the printer you use is a dedicated plotter that is not connected to Windows in the usual way. AutoCAD lets you add custom plotter and prints through the Add-A-Plotter Wizard.

Most of the time, you will use the same set of plotter settings for your drawings. You can save plotter settings using the Page Setup feature.

Plot styles let you control the way lines are printed on paper. You can control lineweights, shading of filled areas, corner treatment of thick lines, and more.

Both color and named plot styles are stored as files. You can create custom plot styles and apply them to any drawing.

Plot styles give you a lot of control over the appearance of lines in your plotted output.

Named plot styles offer a bit more control over the way lines are plotted. If you choose, you can assign named plot styles to objects, bypassing layer assignments.

AutoCAD offers an extensive set of features for adding text to a drawing, but you need to do a little prep work before you dive in.

Before you start to add text, you should set the annotation scale for your drawing. Once this is done, you can begin to add text.

Because text styles contain the font and text-size settings, you can usually set up a text style and then begin to add text to your drawing. For those special cases where you need to vary text height and font or other text features, you can use the Text Formatting toolbar.

In many situations, you need only a single word or a short string of text. AutoCAD offers the Single Line Text object for these instances.

It isn't uncommon for a drawing to contain the equivalent of several pages of text, and the likelihood of having misspelled words can be high. AutoCAD offers the Check Spelling feature to help you keep your spelling under control.

A common activity when editing technical drawings is finding and replacing a word throughout a drawing.

Fields are a special type of text object that can be linked to object properties. They can help to automate certain text-related tasks.

The Tables feature can help you make quick work of schedules and other tabular data that you want to include in a drawing.

Because tables include line work to delineate their different cells, AutoCAD gives you control over table borders and lines.

Tables can also function like a spreadsheet by allowing you to add formulas to cells.

The Table feature allows you to import Microsoft Excel spreadsheets into AutoCAD.

Before you start to dimension with AutoCAD, it helps to become familiar with the different parts of a dimension. This will help you set up your dimensions to fit the style of dimensions that you need.

As you become more familiar with technical drawing and drafting, you'll learn that there are standard formats for drawing dimensions. Arrows, text size, and even the way dimension lines are drawn are all subject to a standard format. Fortunately, AutoCAD offers dimension styles that let you set up your dimension format once and then call up that format whenever you need it.

The most common dimension that you'll use is the linear dimension. Knowing how to place a linear dimension is a big first step in learning how to dimension in AutoCAD.

Dimensions often change in the course of a project, so you should know how to make changes to dimension text or other parts of a dimension.

Not everything you dimension will use linear dimensions. AutoCAD offers a set of dimension tools for dimensioning objects that aren't made up of straight lines.

In addition to dimensions, you'll probably add lots of notes with arrows pointing to features in a design. AutoCAD offers the multileader for this purpose.

When accuracy counts, ordinate dimensions are often used because they measure distances that are similar to coordinates from a single feature.

Mechanical drafting often requires the use of special notation to describe tolerances. AutoCAD offers some predefined symbols that address the need to include tolerance notation in a drawing.

Attributes are a great tool for storing data with drawn objects. You can include as little or as much data as you like in an AutoCAD block.

The data you include in a block is easily changed. You may have several copies of a block, each of which must contain its own unique sets of data.

Attribute data can be extracted in a number of ways so that you can keep track of the data in a drawing.

AutoCAD gives you some great tools that let you convert your paper drawings into AutoCAD files. Several options are available. Depending on your needs, you'll find at least one solution that will allow you to convert your drawings quickly.

You can use bitmap raster images as backgrounds for your CAD drawings or as underlay drawings that you can trace over.

Once imported, raster images can be adjusted for size, brightness, contrast, and transparency.

AutoCAD allows you to import and control the display of PDF files. This is significant since the PDF file format is so prevalent in the business world.

You've seen how you can use Xrefs to quickly build variations of a floor plan that contain repetitive elements. This isn't necessarily the only way to use Xrefs, but the basic idea of how to use Xrefs is presented in the early exercises.

Once you start to edit complex drawings, you'll find that you'll want to save the On/Off or Freeze/Thaw layer states so you can more easily access parts of a drawing. The Layer States Manager offers the ability to save as many layer conditions as you may need in the course of a project.

The Filter and Quick Select tools are great for isolating objects in a crowded drawing. You can select objects by their color or layer assignment. You can select all instances of a specific block.

The QuickCalc calculator offers many standard calculator tools plus a few that you may not see in other calculators.

AutoCAD offers two viewing modes for viewing and printing your drawings. Model Space is where you do most of your work; it's the view you see when you create a new file. Layouts, also called Paper Space, are views that let you arrange the layout of your drawing similar to how you would in a page-layout program.

While in Paper Space, you can create views into your drawing using viewports. You can have several viewports, each showing a different part of your drawing.

Most of the time, you'll probably use rectangular viewports, but you have the option to create a viewport of any shape.

You can get an accurate view of how your drawing will look on paper by making a few adjustments to AutoCAD. Your layout view will reflect how your drawing will look when plotted.

Parametric drawing tools enable you to create an assembly of objects that are linked to each other based on geometric or dimensional properties. With the parametric drawing tools, you can create a drawing that automatically adjusts the size of all its components by changing a single dimension.

You can link objects together so that they maintain a particular orientation to each other.

Dimensional constraints, in conjunction with geometric constraints, let you apply dimensions to an assembly of objects in order to control the size of the assembly.

Dimensional constraints allow you to link dimensions of objects so that if one dimension changes, another dimension follows.

Constraints can be used in a variety of ways to simulate the behavior of real objects.

To create dynamic blocks, you need to become familiar with the Block Editor. You can use the Block Editor to modify existing blocks in your drawing.

Dynamic blocks allow you to add grips to a block that let you modify the block in a number of different ways.

You can set up a dynamic block to perform multiple operations with a single grip.

In addition to having one grip perform multiple operations, you can add as many grips as you need to make your block even more customizable.

Many of the dynamic-block functions let you adjust the shape of the original block. Another feature lets you choose completely different shapes for the block.

Blocks can be set up so the action of one set of objects affects another set. This chapter gives the example of rotating objects in unison.

A dynamic block can help you automate the addition of repetitive elements to your drawing.

Polylines are extremely versatile. You can use them in just about any situation where you need to draw line work that is continuous. For this reason, you'll want to master polylines early in your AutoCAD training.

Polylines can be used to draw fairly accurate renditions of spline curves. This useful feature of polylines make them a very useful AutoCAD object.

If you need an accurate spline curve, then you'll want to use the Spline tool. Spline objects offer many more fine-tuning options that you won't fine with polylines.

The Divide and Measure tools offer a quick way to mark off distances on a curved object. This can be a powerful resource in AutoCAD that you may find yourself using often.

There are a number of ways to find the area of a closed boundary. The easiest way is also perhaps the least obvious.

A lot of information that is stored in AutoCAD drawings can tell you about the files. You can find out how much memory a file uses as well as the amount of time that has been spent editing the file.

Autodesk created the DXF file format as a means of sharing vector drawings with other programs.

AutoCAD drawings find their way into all types of documents, including brochures and technical manuals. Users are often asked to convert their CAD drawings into formats that can be read by page-layout software.

You can import data into AutoCAD from a variety of sources. Most sources, such as bitmap images and text, can be imported as native AutoCAD objects. Other sources may need to be imported as OLE objects.

When you work in 3D, you need a different set of tools from those for 2D drafting. AutoCAD offers the 3D Modeling workspace, which provides the tools you need to create 3D models.

AutoCAD offers a type of object called a 3D solid that lets you quickly create and edit shapes.

The Modeling panel offers a set of basic 3D shapes, but other tools enable you to create virtually any shape you want from 2D drawings.

When you're working in 3D, selecting points can be a complicated task. AutoCAD offers point filters to let you specify the individual X, Y, and Z coordinates of a location in space.

Getting the view you want in a 3D model can be tricky.

At certain points in your model making, you'll want to view your 3D model with surface colors and even material assignments. AutoCAD offers several ways to do this.

Sometimes, it's helpful to convert a 3D model view into a 2D AutoCAD drawing. AutoCAD offers the Flatshot tool, which quickly converts a 3D view into a 2D line drawing.

The User Coordinate System (UCS) is a vital key to editing in 3D space. If you want to master 3D modeling, you should become familiar with this tool.

You can set up the UCS orientation for any situation. It isn't limited to the predefined settings.

In some 3D modeling operations, it helps to have several different views of the model through the Viewports feature.

You aren't limited to straight, flat surfaces in AutoCAD. You can create just about any shape you want, including curved surfaces.

Spiral forms frequently occur in nature, so it's no wonder that we often use spirals in our own designs. Spirals are seen in screws, stairs, and ramps as well as other manmade forms.

You can create a 3D surface by connecting a series of lines that define a surface contour. You can create anything from a 3D landscape to a car fender using this method.

You can move objects in 3D space using tools that are similar to those for 2D drafting. But when it comes to editing objects, 3D modeling is much more complex than 2D drafting.

One of the more practical uses of AutoCAD's rendering feature is to simulate the sun's location and resulting shadows. You can generate shadow studies for any time of the year in any location on the earth.

AutoCAD lets you create materials that you can apply to the objects in your model to simulate a realistic appearance.

You can use materials and lights together to control the appearance of your model.

Texture maps can be used to create a number of effects in your model. You can use a brick texture map that repeats over a surface to simulate a brick wall, or you can use a photograph of a building to turn a box into a building.

In addition to adjusting the materials and lighting to control the look of your rendering, you can make other adjustments to your rendering through the Render panel and the Render window.

When you create a view using the View Manager dialog box, you're actually creating a camera. Cameras are objects that let you control the orientation and view target for a view, among other things.

You can save your rendered views as bitmap files using the Render window. If you prefer, you can also have AutoCAD include a rendering in a layout. You can include different renderings of the same file in a single layout.

When you want to get a more accurate rendition of the lighting effects on your model, you can use some of the advanced rendering features that simulate natural light.

Solid modeling lets you build 3D models by creating and joining 3D shapes called solids. There are several built-in solid shapes called primitives, and you can create others using the Extrude tool.

You can use Boolean operations to sculpt 3D solids into the shape you want. Two solids can be joined to form a more complex one, or you can remove one solid from another.

Besides the primitives, you can create your own shapes based on 2D polylines.

Once you've created a solid, you can make changes to it using the solid-editing tools offered on the Solid Editing panel.

You can create 3D orthogonal views of your 3D model to create standard 2D mechanical drawings.

In addition to viewing your 3D model in a number of different orientations, you can view it as if it were transparent or cut in half.

Mesh modeling allows you to create more organic 3D forms by giving you unique smoothing and editing tools. You can start your mesh model by creating a basic shape using the mesh primitives.

The ability to edit faces and edges is essential to creating complex shapes with mesh objects.

The Mesh primitives let you create shapes that enclose a volume. If you just want to model a smooth, curved surface in 3D, you might find the surface mesh tools helpful.

You can convert a mesh into a 3D solid in order to take advantage of many of the solid editing tools available in AutoCAD.

The Express tools have been around for a while and were originally intended to show what could be done with customization. Many users have come to rely on some of these tools.

AutoLISP is a macro language that gives you the ability to create your own commands.

One of the simplest ways to start using AutoLISP is to enter an AutoLISP expression directly into the command line.

AutoLISP needs two elements, an argument and an expression, to do any work.

You can input a simple program directly into AutoCAD by entering it through the command line.

AutoLISP offers an expression that lets you select objects and then perform some operation on the set of objects.

You can set up an AutoLISP program to test for conditions and perform different operations depending on the result.

The functions in AutoLISP are designed to work with their own types of data. For example, math functions work only with numbers, and string operations work only with text. If you need to use the result of a math function in text, you can convert the number into text.

You can save your AutoLISP program in a text editor like Windows Notepad and then later have AutoCAD retrieve your program for use any time.

Often with AutoCAD, you find that you have different sets of panels or toolbars open to perform specific tasks. You might have one set of Ribbon panels for editing text and dimensions, whereas another set is more useful for design. Workspaces are a great way to organize your different editing modes.

In addition to using workspaces to organize toolbars and Ribbon panels, you can customize the AutoCAD interface to make it fit the way you like to work. You can add tools to Ribbon panels or even create your own tools for operations you perform frequently.

A macro is a set of instructions that performs more complex operations than single commands. Macros are often built on commands with additional predefined responses to help speed data input.

Keyboard shortcuts can help improve your speed when drawing in AutoCAD. They can reduce several clicks of the mouse to a simple keystroke. AutoCAD lets you create custom shortcuts for your favorite commands.

To keep your customizations organized, you can save new toolbars, menus, and Ribbons as files that you can load on demand. When you save your custom elements as a file, you can move them to other computers.

If you're adventurous, you may want to try your hand at creating more complex macros. The Diesel macro language is an easy introduction to AutoCAD macro customization and is most useful in controlling the behavior in menu options.

AutoCAD offers a number of noncontinuous linetypes, and you may find them adequate for most of your work. But every now and then, you may need a specific linetype that isn't available. Creating custom linetypes is easy once you understand the process.

Like linetypes, the hatch patterns provided by AutoCAD will probably fill most of your needs. But every now and then, you may need to produce a specific pattern.

As a drafter or designer, it's very likely that you'll be involved in collaborative efforts, which means you'll have to share your work with others. The Internet has made it much easier to do this.

Autodesk offers the DWF drawing format, which lets non-CAD users view and add comments to your drawings. You can use the Publish feature to create a single DWF file from several drawings.

The DesignCenter is a great tool for managing your drawings' resources, like blocks, custom linetypes, and other elements.

AutoCAD allows for a wide range of settings in a drawing. For this reason, it's a good idea to create standards for the way drawings are set up.

If you exchange files with another office, you may find that their layer scheme is different from yours. AutoCAD offers the Layer Translator to help you translate layer names from an unfamiliar drawing to names you're more comfortable with.

The Sheet Set feature is like a database that automatically keeps track of drawings and drawing resources for your projects. To use sheets sets successfully, you need to make sure the Sheet Set Manager is aware of all the drawings and resources used in a project.

If you have existing project files, you can set up a sheet set to work with them.

When the Sheet Set Manager is aware of a drawing or drawing resource, you can automate the creation of sheets such as elevations and sections. You can also control the naming and numbering of drawings in a set through the Sheet Set Manager.

To use sheets sets to their full potential, you should create title blocks and callout blocks that are sheet set aware so they can communicate with the Sheet Set Manager.

As a project starts to grow, you'll have to keep track of sheet and reference drawings as well as other drawing resources. Because the Sheet Set Manager is already aware of all the files needed for a project, you can use it to help keep track of project files.