It's a new year at Autodesk and I'm looking forward to a great year of great software releases. For myself - I believe I'll be focusing on AutoCAD for Mac, the next release of AutoCAD and maybe even the new Autodesk Design Suite. I hope you all enjoyed a great holiday season and are rejuvenated for the new year!
An AutoCAD Hip Tip on a new tool called Add Selected.
This tool is simple - you use it when you want to create an object with the same properties as an existing one in your drawing. You don't want to fuss with figuring out the linetype, layer, lineweight, etc - you want AutoCAD to do this work for you. Simply select an object with the properties you want - right click and select Add Selected from the shortcut menu.
AutoCAD will then execute the same command that was used to create the selected object - along with the same properties (linetype, layer, color, etc). This doesn't change your current layer or properties settings (which is nice) - just the properties of the object being drawn.
This comes in ESPECIALLY handy if you're working on someone elses drawing. Maybe you just need to add a couple of dimensions to the drawing - but you don't have a clue what settings they were using - no problem - ADD Selected to the rescue! Simply select one of their existing dimensions and AutoCAD will launch you into the same type of dimension command used with the exact same dimension style and scale - it couldn't be easier.
The chart below (from the AutoCAD 2011 Help file) shows you exactly what settings are retained when you use ADD Selected. I love using it for Hatch and Text - makes my drawing life just so much easier!
Now - if you didn't get a Holiday card from me - I thought the least I could do was post the picture we sent out this year. For those of you who are new - we have two "kids" named Conan and Leno (you shouldn't be asking which one is which - I think that's pretty obvious). For the record - it is IMPOSSIBLE to get goats to cooperate when taking a picture - we were at our wits end before we finally got this very last decent shot!
Happy New Year to you all! Thanks for reading my blog.