Okay, I know, I have been MIA, I am 95% settled in our new place, and hope to finish up a few things this weekend and unpack a little more. The fabulous news is that my air conditioning has been installed! WOOT! Programmable thermostat, so when I get home, my pad has been cooling for half an hour already. Niiiiice.
I have been slacking with my users group, and I do hope they will understand and forgive me. The ICC newsletter went out a little late due to my move/getting things ready at home, and a big project here at work... but, as I also handle the ICC's [now defunct] disbursement to my group, I have to write an article for local news to tack on before I send it out.
Well, our esteemed president pinged me on that... d'oh... I didn't forget you guys... well, yeah, okay, I actually did.
Rest assured, the article will be written and the newsletter will be distributed next week.
I am taking a 3-day weekend to spend some QT with a certain someone... (and, also to enlist his help in assembling the rest of my furniture. Shhhhh, don't tell him I said that). I will be out of the office on Monday, and I will be at our Annual Planning Conference on Thursday and Friday.
AutoCAD Express Cool!
Today, I'd like to remind everyone to check out their Express Tools.
We can get in the habit of using a certain set of tools and never explore what else is out there. I encourage you to flip around and check things out... (oh, and don't forget, the Express Tools V1-9 are a separate install from ACAD. Although, in r2006, you can now choose to have them installed at the same time, aaaaand, express tools, are LSP files (lisp), so they cannot be used in LT)
I'm going to point out one command that I like from each section in the drop-down, and list it's respective command line call:
Layers > Layer Isolate (layiso)
Blocks > Explode Attributes to Text (burst)
Text > Enclose Text with Object (tcircle)
Layout Tools > Change Space (chspace)
Dimension > honestly, I don't dimension, so, I couldn't really care less ;)
Selection Tools > Fast Select (fs - selects objects that touch a specified object)
Modify > Delete Duplicate Objects (overkill)
Draw > Break-line Symbol (breakline)
File Tools > Save All Drawings (saveall)
Web Tools > Change URL's (churls)
Tools > System Variable Editor (sysvdlg)
> honestly, all of the tools under this one are super-cool... a must-check
Web Links > Express Tools Newsgroup
Express Tools FAQ > no flyout here, just remember that it's there
Help > same as the above
An item of note is that all of the layer Express Tools were brought into core AutoCAD in R2007. But, the Layer Merge (LAYMRG) command, which is currently grouped under CAD Manager tools, is still not available in AutoCAD LT, which has none of the CAD Manager tools.
Change Space (CHSPACE) is also now a part of AutoCAD.
Don't forget to keep an eye on that little gray area below the command line... if you hover over one of these tools in the menu, you can check down there for a description of the tool, as well as the key combination to invoke it from the command line.
Take care and have a great weekend... I'll be back with more of the same next week.
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