Lynn Allen's Blog

As the Sabbatical Turns and an AutoCAD Hip Tip on Matching Dimscales!

I am officially on week three of my sabbatical and it is all spinning away much too quickly!  Believe it or not there is a blog completely dedicated to people on sabbatical called YourSabbatical.com and they asked me if they could link to my blog...how cool is that?  Now does that mean I need to have some type of epiphany while I am on sabbatical in order to remain worthy of their website?  I guess I'd better get going on the "epiphany hunt"...Click here to see my blog referenced on their site as seen below.

An AutoCAD Hip Tip on Matching Dimension Scales:

If you've ever wandered into someone elses drawing where they used multiple dimension scales  you may have found yourself doing a little trial and error to create a new dimension that matched up with an existing one.  Quickly find the dimension scale of an existing dimension by selecting the dimension, going into Properties and you will find the option "Dim scale overall" in the Fit section (okay...not intuitively obvious).

 

So there is your Hip Tip to kick off your week! 

The 2008 National Collegiate FM Technology Conference

So far I'm not doing a very good job at being on Sabbatical!  Today I was a keynote speaker at the 2008 National Collegiate FM Technology Conference in Los Angeles.  I did a presentation on "It's a 3D World After All" and talked about  Building Information Modeling (BIM) as it related to Facilities Management.  The conference is made up of facility managers from college and university campuses all over the U.S.  Did you know that BYU (where I went to college) has all of their campus buildings modeled in Revit?  USC has over 40 of their buildings modeled in Revit.

Jose Delgado, from USC Facilities Management,  was a host and one of the people responsible for getting me to present (during my sabbatical no less).  He kindly presented me with a USC football autographed by Pete Carroll, their well known Head Coach!  What a treat for me!

So now I am officially going to relax and enjoy my sabbatical!  Before I do...I want to make an amendment to my Hip Tip from Monday.  Murray Clack sent me info regarding a system variable that allows you to put the Overlapping objects selection option back to Control (from a combination of Shift+Spacebar).  If you have no idea what gibberish I am talking about - read my last post please!

So to put this behavior back to using the Control key to cycle through overlapping objects - you can set LEGACYCTRLPICK  to a value of 1.  Thank you Murray!

And now...I look forward to returning to my white fluffy dog who doesn't even recognize me any more! 

Let the Sabbatical Begin (and an AutoCAD Hip Tip!)

One of the great things about working for Autodesk is that every four years we are granted a 6 week sabbatical!  Well the time has come (once again) for me to enjoy mine!  Hoorah!  The goal here is to take a great big breath, relax, regroup and re-energize oneself.  For me - it's my chance to catch up on all of those things that get thrown by the wayside when you travel too much (you don't EVEN want to look in my closet!). 

Technically my sabbatical started a week ago - but the family made a mad dash for a vacation and I wasn't able to blog before I left (you know how crazy things get when you are trying to get an entire family together for a vacation!).   so that means I am down to 5 weeks left...

I'll check in from time to time on sabbatical (I'm sure you will be thrilled to hear how that closet is going!).

And...incidently...Autodesk University officially opened its doors to registration and we are already 1000 attendees ahead of last year at the same time...Oh my goodness!!! You'd better hurry and sign up before all the good classes are gone!

Here is an AutoCAD Hip Tip for you...even though I am on vacation (who loves you Baby?)

An AutoCAD Hip Tip on Selecting Overlapping Objects:

When selecting objects for editing, we sometimes run across objects on top of other objects. It isn't always easy selecting the correct object in such cases, and I in the past I would recommend using the Control Key to toggle through all the possibilties. As you held down the Control key and picked on the screen, AutoCAD would toggle through all of the possible objects that fell under the pick box, highlighting them one at a time. When the proper object was highlighted you were ready to continue with the command. (Let me just say that this is SOOOO much easier to show than to try to write about).

This was one of the tips I was going to show in my "75 Tips in 75 Minutes" class for the last AUGI CAD Camp. Much to my surprise I found out that the Control Key no longer allows you to do this nifty practice. Instead - it has been replaced with a combination of Shift and the Spacebar (what a wacky combo!). So now we have to be a little more coordinated under such circumstances but rest assured - it still works!

Want to test it out? Draw a line on top of another line. Enter the Erase command and place the cursor over both objects while holding down the Shift+Spacebar (or Control if you are in an earlier release). Pick on the screen and you will see that AutoCAD will toggle through both the objects...

So there is a summer time Hip Tip! 

The Education Tour is Over and an AutoCAD Hip Tip!

I am certainly going to be sad about the ending of the Education Tour.  What a great opportunity to spend so much time with all the teachers!  I truly enjoyed myself and look forward to doing another tour in the future.  And as always...they didn't just learn from me - I definitely did my fair share of learning from them as well.

I had to take a picture of the crew from the very last event...it was held at the extremely nice Anthem College in Phoenix, Arizona.  Below you'll find our host, Floyd McWilliams of Anthem College (in the suit jacket), Maureen Higgins, the local Autodesk Education Rep, and a very nice man from CADsoft Consulting whose name I forgot (Bad Lynn).  I am really bad with names (so embarassing).  Floyd is a member of the ADDA Board and invited me to speak at their annual meeting in Nashville next year - I am looking forward to it!

 

They took me on a tour of their Veterinary school at Anthem and I couldn't help but let one of the dogs out of their pen so I could pet him (also Bad Lynn).  He was so adorable and in desperate need of a little petting (please don't tell on me).  I just couldn't resist. 

An AutoCAD Hip Tip on Controlling Object Frames:

Various imported objects have frames: Images, DWFs, DGN and OLE. In order to edit these objects we need to have their frames turned ON but we often want those frames turned off for printing. We use the IMAGEFRAME, DWFFRAME, DGNFRAME, and OLEFRAME system variables to control the visibility of frames. If you are tired of flipping these frames on and off you'll appreciate that the setting of "2" (added recently to AutoCAD) turns the frames on for editing but doesn't display them during printing. Hoorah!