Have you ever had trouble making the display order of objects stay the way you want? Sadly the DRAWORDER command isn’t always as reliable as I would like it to be. Here is how I force the draw order to stick: Read more »

Have you ever experienced a problem when you try to fillet a polyline only to have it fillet the wrong way? A tipster posted the answer to Cadalyst…

All you need to do is reverse the direction of the offending polyline (type PEDIT, select the polyline and type R for “reverse”) and try the fillet command again.

Autodesk released a new version of AutoCAD and it has a lot of improvements. Check out this guide which shows what’s new. Are you upgrading to AutoCAD 2013? Why or why not?

Due to limited time and because I’m feeling lazy today, this is going to be a short post.

Ever wonder how to properly explode a block that contains attributes without having the text revert to the attribute tag? Try the BURST command. It a special “explode” command made for blocks with attributes.

See, I told you this was short.

My friend and coworker @deanhuber emailed me with this tip today: Read more »

I’m lazy so I like less keystrokes. For example when I am running the PEDIT command on an object that isn’t a polyline, I don’t want to be prompted with this every time:

Do you want to turn it into one? <Y>

Read more »

I just read an excellent tutorial by David Watson at CADTutor.net. David writes, “AutoCAD can be used to create a simple “walk through” of any 3D model. For example, if you have designed a new pedestrianisation scheme for a town centre, you could use AutoCAD to give a slide presentation to show how the scheme would look from a pedestrian eye view as the person moved through the space. This is an extremely useful technique for presenting schemes to clients or the general public who may not necessarily have a good understanding of plans.” Read more »

Matt Murphy showed this tip in a class at Autodesk University. He explained that AutoCAD attaches XData to objects in drawings and this data allows information to be associated with specific objects. The problem is that when objects that contained XData are deleted from the drawing, the registered application becomes unreferenced. If you get a large amount of unreferenced registered applications in a file, it can increase the file size and cause sluggish performance. Read more »

Erhan Toker from the DailyAutoCAD.com website posted an excellent tutorial on using the command LENGTHEN. He said, “Most of the time; we use TRIM and EXTEND for editing the lengths of objects. However, we may wish to define the length of an object to a certain value. This is when the LENGTHEN command comes in handy.” Check it out…

I am on my way to the airport to fly to Las Vegas for Autodesk University. This morning I thought I would share a simple command that can save you from a lot of embarrassment.

There is nothing worse than having someone else point out a spelling mistake on your drawing. That is why I am thankful for AutoCAD’s built-in spell checker. Read more »

Want to know a quick way to rename something in your drawing? Read more »