Well the playoffs continued this weekend and my team is out...:-( Alas - I had to put away my Peyton Manning jersey, Colts necklace and Colts hat for another year. Thank you to all of you who sent me condolences (as I type I received another from John Moran of Boeing) and no thanks to those of you who rubbed it in (ouch!). Well at least one Manning brother made it to next week...
Last week I hit the new year running as I presented in Atlanta, Albany and Toronto doing presentations from Inventor to AutoCAD. The break was very refreshing to me and I was looking forward to ramping back up and sharing some Tips and Tricks with my fellow users. Visiting our customers at Clough Harbour and Associates is always a highlight for me - I threaten to move to Albany just so I can hang out with them more (not to mention the cheesecake!) A great big thank you to Brian, Eileen, Matt, Clarence (aka Derrick), Preston, Jennifer, and of course Len. I am so terribly spoiled when I visit them.
This week I'll be doing a new presentation in Portland - "60 AutoCAD Tips in 60 Minutes". So I'll be fine-tuning that prezo this week as I attempt to share a tip a minute with the customers of PPI Group. New presentations are always a little rough but I am hoping to iron out the wrinkles with lots of practice before I go.
An AutoCAD Hip Tip on Isolating Layers:
Many of you are familiar with the cool tool LAYISO (started as an Express Tool and grew up to be a real AutoCAD command in AutoCAD 2007). The goal behind this tool was to make it super simple to isolate objects quickly by turning off all the layers the selected objects do NOT reside on. In a nutshell, you enter the LAYISO command, select any objects you wish to isolate, AutoCAD checks out the layers these objects are on and turns off all of the rest - make sense? If you care to bring all those layers back on you can use the LAYUNISO command.
In AutoCAD 2008 the LAYISO command was added to the Layers control panel in the dashboard as seen below.
And rather than dramatically turn off all of the other layers - those layers are now faded and locked as seen below.
This makes it easy to see and osnap to the objects on the other layers for reference - but you can't hurt them!
The real tip I'd like to share here is that you are not forced to use the new fading procedure (even though I think it's pretty cool). Many of you have written requesting the ability to put it LAYISO back to the way it used to be (for a variety of reasons). No problem - you'll find a "Settings" option in the command that allows you to do exactly that - simply switch to "off" to return it to it's legacy behavior.
Command: LAYISO
Current setting: Lock layers, Fade=81
Select objects on the layer(s) to be isolated or [Settings]: S
Enter setting for layers not isolated [Off/Lock and fade] <Lock and fade>:
Here you can also key in a number between 0 and 90 to use as a fade factor. 90 being the most faded (without turning them off)... 0 not being faded at all (but still locked).
Well there is your AutoCAD Hip Tip to start your week off! Enjoy (and don't work TOO hard!)
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