The Holidays are off and running and I'm trying desperately to catch up with my extremely organized friends (you know who you are!). I'm not holding my breath though...I remember last year wrapping presents on Christmas Eve for about 8 hours! Oh the disorganization of it all... I vowed never to let that happen again (nevermore, nevermore).
Backing up a couple of weeks (back to the AU days), it's always a pleasure to take some of our top instructors to lunch and a champagne toast after it's all said and done. We do this right after the last class on Friday. I thought I'd include our picture from this year (a couple of the usual crew couldn't make it this year) because it just brings back such great memories for me. Most of the people in this picture I've known for nearly 20 years - isn't that amazing? Poor Tom Conti (Disney) in the back row stayed up the night before putting the finishing touches on his class until 5:00am so we were just impressed he didn't fall asleep in his soup.
And this picture was also taken on the last day of AU of me and Joseph Wurcher. Joseph is already looking ahead to next year's AU (and the year after that) trying to take the event to the next level...
Joseph is, of course, the keeper of the AU Blog as well!
AHoliday AutoCAD Hip Tip on Super Purging your Drawing Files:
So you've purged and cleaned your drawing to death and it's still big, big, big! You want it small, small, small. Well I'm here to share with you a little known secret that those of us who've used the product for eons have been doing for decades (literally). Back before the Purge command entered our world we would use the WBLOCK command to do a clean sweep of our drawing - taking just those things we want and leaving behind the messy, disorganized, junk that we don't. It works like this.
Make sure all the objects in the drawing are displayed (all the layers you want to take with you are on). Enter the WBLOCK command, leaving the insertion point at 0,0,0 and use the Select Objects option to Window all the objects in the drawing. Don't use the "All" option or anything like that because you want to only select the objects on the screen and no "mystery" objects. Assign a name to the new drawing file (don't overwrite this one until you know it's all good) and Poof! Your new drawing file is nice and compact with no extra gremlins or unreferenced nonsense in it!
This really only works well if you are living in the world of Model Space with no Layout tabs. If you want to try a similar thing on a drawing with lots of layouts then you'll need to resort to the command line interface version of the command. To get to that you'll need to place a dash in front of the command and key it in at the command line.
Command: -WBLOCK
Enter the name of the drawing file you want to create
Enter name of existing block or
[= (block=output file)/* (whole drawing)] <define new drawing>: *
You'll want to enter in an asterisk to grab the entire drawing. This will also clean up your drawing and rid your world of extra "stuff" you don't want in your life. If only I had this command for my closet!
This can really significantly reduce your file size...give it a whirl! What have you got to lose (except for a few extra drawing pounds)


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