1. I am a huge fan of typing commands & command aliases. Here is a list of commonly-used command aliases. If you are unfamiliar with them, take one or two and start using them instead of clicking the toolbar button. Once you get the hang of typing rather than clicking buttons, you will start seeing big time-savings. I have one hand on the keyboard and one hand on the mouse.
2. Instead of typing in commands again and again, use the up and down arrows to scroll through recently typed commands and hit enter or the spacebar to execute them. This enables you to type less than necessary.
3. Quickly switch between opened drawings by holding down CTRL and hitting the Tab button.
4. When you need quick access to an OSNAP, you can hold down SHIFT and right-click.
5. Hold down the middle “scroll-wheel” mouse button to pan. This is much faster than clicking the pan button or even typing “P” on the command line. If it doesn’t work for you, type the MBUTTONPAN system variable and set it to 1.
6. Zoom in and out with the scroll-wheel on your mouse.

If you have any tips for faster drafting, share them here as comments.

1. Type IMAGEQUALITY and set it to “Draft” for faster-loading images in AutoCAD. When plotting however, you might want to switch it back to “High”.
2. Type IMAGEHLT on the command line and set it to 0. This will make AutoCAD highlight only the raster image frame when selecting it, not the entire image.
3. Set GRIPOBJLIMIT to a really low number to reduce the number of grips displayed when selecting multiple objects.
4. The system variable ISAVEPERCENT is set to 50 by default. Increase this number (100 max) to force AutoCAD to do full saves less frequently. If it is set to 0, AutoCAD will do a full save every time. The benefit of a full save is that it eliminates the wasted space in a drawing file - but it is slower.
5. Type VTOPTIONS on the command line to change how AutoCAD handles animated view transitions. It is a good idea to turn off the animated view transitions when dealing with large drawings.
6. Jimmy from JTB World posted a great suggestion for working with drawings that contain a XREFs, XCLIPs, & viewports. He suggested setting the system variable INDEXCTL to 3 to speed things up when switching between drawings.

If you have any tips for speeding up AutoCAD share them here as comments.

When plotting or publishing PDFs you can set it to publish individual PDF files or a single PDF file with many pages/sheets. The system variable is PUBLISHCOLLATE.

Set it to 1 to publish a single PDF with many sheets. Set it to 0 (zero) to publish individual PDF files.

Thanks for pointing this out Shaan!

Take my previous post on writing AutoCAD scripts with Excel for example. If you had a block that had Northing, Easting, & Elevation attributes in it, you could copy/paste the Northing, Easting, & Elevation cells where they need to be after the block insertion (in the correct order of course) so that when the insertion command prompts for the attributes, they are filled with the data provided in the Excel spreadsheet.

CAUTION: When filling in attribute data with a script, it accepts spaces. This means that the value/data filling in each attribute needs to be on it’s own line inside the script file.

Of course, to make sure it runs on command line only, you should add this to the beginning of your script:

ATTDIA 0

Play with it.

If you want to select the most recent object added to the drawing, run a command (such as PROPERTIES) and at the select objects command prompt, type L (for “last”). Only the most recently-created object will be selected.

For example, say you want to start a line midway between two points. You would start the LINE command and at the prompt type either MTP or M2P (both do the same thing). You will be prompted with:

First point of mid:

If you have running OSNAPs on, you can snap to any point. If you don’t have running OSNAPs on but want to use one, simply type one such as END to select an endpoint. You will then be prompted with this:

Second point of mid:

Select a second point just like you did the first and it will start the line midway between the two points you picked.

The benefit of using Grip Object Limit is to help speed up AutoCAD when selecting objects. The default setting for Grip Object Limit is 100 so it won’t display grips when you select more than 100 ojects. Yes, you can increase this, but be careful. Don’t set it too high. If your Grip Object Limit was set to, say, 30000 and you tried to select something like 25,000 objects, AutoCAD may come to a screeching stop as it trys to display each and every grip.

Type GRIPOBJLIMIT on the command line to change it.

As you can see, you can create your own hatch patterns with images, blocks, XREFs, etc. Pretty cool!

Open a DWF in Design Review and select a sheet that you want to compare.

Go up to “Tools” and select “Compare…”

Browse to find a DWF of the same drawing set, created at a different time. Then select the same sheet that you currently have open in Design Review.

If you want, you can change the default colors for things that were deleted or added between the sheets.

Final result is essentially an automatic markup of the DWF sheet showing what is new and what has been deleted.

(the sheet shown above was compared to a completely different sheet to show exaggerated differences)

In your XREF drawing(s) create views around each of your details. Name the views according to what the detail actually is. This is very important and will save you a little time later on. To create a view, type VIEW on the command line. You will see a box like this:

Click “New…”

Type in the name of the detail, and click the “Define window” radio button to create a view box around the detail. I recommend unchecking the box next to “Save layer snapshot with view”. Repeat this for all the detail views in the drawing.

Open a sheet through Sheet Set Manager…

In the “Model Views” tab of the Sheet Set Manager palette click the plus [+] box next to your detail drawing to expand the views. Right-click on the view you want and select “Place on Sheet”.

Before you click to place your view, right-click and select a scale.

Then click to place the view on your sheet. The XREF will be automatically attached to the drawing and a viewport created at the scale you specified with the view title below.