Productivity tips for AutoCAD

00:04

In this lesson, I'm going to insert a PDF file and make some changes to it using tools inside of AutoCAD.

00:11

PDFs are attached as an underlay.

00:14

You can use your object snaps when working with an underlay if you have your settings correct and the underlay file was created correctly.

00:21

I'm going to use some of the more advanced options for the chamfer and fillet tools.

00:26

I'll copy some drawing objects from one drawing to another.

00:30

And I'll finish with the Overkill Command: One of my favorite tools inside of AutoCAD.

00:36

Overkill eliminates overlapping lines to help you clean up your drawings.

00:40

This is especially helpful if you have inserted external references in your drawing, which is one way overlapping lines can occur.

00:49

To insert the PDF file, I select the Insert tab.

00:54

I select the Attach tool.

00:56

I set my files of type to PDF.

00:60

I select the PDF file I want to use, I click "Open".

01:05

I accept the defaults to insert the PDF at the origin with the rotation of 0, and scale of 1.

01:12

I click "OK".

01:14

The PDF is inserted.

01:16

I select the PDF.

01:18

I toggle Enable Snap for PDF "On" on the ribbon.

01:24

I want to modify this schematic.

01:27

I select the Line tool from the Draw panel on the Home tab.

01:31

I place a couple of lines.

01:34

Notice that I can use the endpoint snap to select the endpoints of existing lines in the PDF underlay.

01:41

I can create a corner using the fillet tool by holding down the "Shift" key on the keyboard.

01:48

By holding down the "Shift" key, I override the radius value.

01:52

So, I don't need to set the radius value on my fillet to "0".

01:57

I select the fillet tool from the Modify panel on the Home tab.

02:01

I Right Click and select Radius.

02:05

I set my radius to "0.5".

02:08

I select one line, I hold down the "Shift" key and select a second line that is perpendicular to the first line.

02:16

And I created a corner without having to change my radius to "0".

02:22

I'm going to switch to another drawing and attach an Xref.

02:26

I type "Xref" to open the Xref Manager.

02:30

I select Attach Drawing.

02:33

I locate the AutoCAD drawing I want to attach.

02:37

I accept the defaults to insert the PDF at the origin with the rotation angle of "0" and scale of "1".

02:45

I click "OK".

02:47

Once again, I can snap to the endpoints inside of the Xref to place some additional wire lines.

02:56

I select the Rectangle tool and draw a rectangle.

03:00

I draw two more lines using the midpoint of the top of the rectangle and the midpoint of the bottom of the rectangle.

03:08

I want to chamfer for the rectangle using the polyline option and with No Trim enabled.

03:15

The chamfer tool is located in the fly out under the fillet tool.

03:20

I select the Chamfer tool from the Modify panel on the ribbon.

03:24

I Right Click and select "Trim".

03:27

I select the No Trim option.

03:30

I Right Click and select "Polyline" to select the polyline option.

03:36

I Right Click and set the start distance to "0.1", and I set the second distance to "0.1".

03:44

I select the "Rectangle".

03:47

The chamfers are placed.

03:49

Notice that the corners are not trimmed.

03:52

I Right Click and select Repeat Chamfer.

03:57

I Right Click and select Trim.

03:60

I select the Trim option.

04:02

I Right Click and select the Multiple option.

04:06

This allows me to continue placing chamfers until I press "Enter" to exit the command.

04:13

I select some lines to be chamfered.

04:15

I place to chamfers using the trim method.

04:20

I press "Enter" to exit the Chamfer command.

04:24

I'm going to place a few more lines.

04:27

I want to demonstrate how to use fillet on parallel lines.

04:31

I place two parallel lines.

04:33

I can use the fillet to close or cap the ends.

04:37

I select the fillet tool from the Modify panel on the Home tab.

04:42

I Right Click and select Multiple.

04:46

I select the two parallel lines.

04:49

An arc is added to cap the lines.

04:52

I can place an arc at either end of the two parallel lines.

04:57

I press "Enter" to exit the Fillet command.

05:02

I want to copy and paste from one drawing to another.

05:06

I window around the chamfered rectangle I just created.

05:10

I Right Click and select Clipboard, Copy with Basepoint.

05:15

I select the midpoint at the bottom of the rectangle as my base point.

05:21

I switch to my target drawing.

05:23

This is the drawing with the PDF underlay.

05:26

I Right Click and select Clipboard, Paste.

05:30

I select a location to place the geometry.

05:34

One of my favorite tools in AutoCAD is Overkill.

05:38

Overkill deletes overlapping lines.

05:41

I switch over to my overkill drawing.

05:45

I type "Overkill".

05:47

I type "All" to select everything in the drawing to be inspected.

05:52

I press "Enter".

05:54

A dialog opens.

05:56

I have enabled combined collinear objects, which means that if two lines overlap but extend out away from each other,

06:04

they will be combined into a single line; similar to the Join command.

06:09

I click "OK".

06:11

Look by the command prompt to see how many overlapping lines were deleted.

06:16

If you missed that message, just press "F2" to expand the Command Prompt window.

06:22

In this lesson, I demonstrated the ability to use object snaps in external references and underlays.

06:30

I reviewed some of the more advanced options in chamfer and fillet, like multiple and polyline.

06:37

I showed you how to use the "Shift" key to create a corner using fillet.

06:41

The "Shift" method allows you to retain whatever radius value you are using in fillet.

06:46

Copy with Basepoint allows you to copy objects from one drawing to another.

06:52

Finally, I showed you how to use the overkill tool to eliminate overlapping lines in your drawing.

00:04

In this video, we're going to take a look at how we can maintain our files using the drawing utilities in AutoCAD.

00:14

We'll be looking at how the drawing recovery tools work in AutoCAD, especially when a file has been closed down unexpectedly.

00:22

For example, you might have a power outage and your auto cad shuts down without you shutting it down following the relevant process.

00:31

Based on that will also perform a drawing audit so that you can audit your recovered drawing.

00:38

And then what we're going to do as well is look at how we can purge your drawing to remove any non necessary drawing objects.

00:46

You'll notice in this particular drawing when we're in AutoCAD that we've got the drawing recovery manager open.

00:55

Now the reason that the drawing recovery manager has opened when we've opened this drawing is the AutoCAD may have closed down unexpectedly.

01:03

You might have had a power outage, you might have switched off your machine without actually closing AutoCAD properly,

01:10

of following the proper closing process when you shut down auto camp.

01:15

Now when you do that, the drawing recovery manager notes that you haven't closed down a drawing properly,

01:20

so you can see here that it's telling us that the file maintenance start drawing wasn't shut down properly

01:27

and it's opened it up in the recovery manager.

01:29

So you can see we've got the DWP file and also what they call the BAK file, the backup file available.

01:36

So what it means is potentially we can open up this file and obviously check that it is okay now I know it's okay,

01:45

but what happens is we can open that file there as you can see far maintenance start dot D W G.

01:51

We can then save that particular drawing like so and that's now saved and you'll notice that things have changed here.

01:58

It kind of goes up into the recovery manager when you perform a save,

02:03

and what you've done there is you've saved whatever is in that drawing that AutoCAD has recovered for you.

02:09

Once you've done that you can then close the drawing recovery manager like so.

02:15

Now one of the things that you might need to do after you've recovered a drawing is you might need to perform a drawing audit.

02:23

Now these are very quick and easy to perform but you need to know where to find the audit command.

02:29

Quickest way is in the application menu up here, click on the fly out next to the red A.

02:35

And you want to come down to drawing utilities and there's the audit commander there.

02:40

Now you can just type audit as well that will do the same thing.

02:44

But if I select audit like so it will now prompt me to fix any errors that might be detected.

02:50

So I can say yes to that or no to that.

02:53

Now ideally if you just recovered your drawing there could be corruption and errors in the DWG file,

02:60

so you want to type why For yes there and just press enter like so,

03:06

now as soon as you do that it doesn't audit and you can see at the bottom there on the command line, total errors found at zero.

03:12

I can just expand the command line here for a moment.

03:15

Let's just do that. There we go.

03:17

And it's going through the header, the tables the auditing entities pass one passed two,

03:23

and you can see there's two blocks that have been audited and there's no errors found.

03:27

Therefore it hasn't erased any objects that might be corrupted.

03:32

So the good thing is there are drawing is okay even though it opened up in the drawing recovery manager.

03:39

So that's two ways where you can maintain your AutoCad drawing files.

03:45

I'd like to show you one more really really clever function in AutoCad.

03:50

And that is the purge command.

03:53

Now the purge command lets you remove non necessary objects and entities from your AutoCad drawings.

04:00

So you'll notice in this particular drawing we have some relays in the Schematic drawing starting at R001 here,

04:08

going across to R006 here and you'll notice that they are a block reference and we don't want those blocks in our particular drawing.

04:18

So what I can do here is I can actually delete the blocks.

04:21

No problem at all.

04:22

If I select one of those right click and go to erase that erases the block now, that's great.

04:28

I've erased the block.

04:30

But the problem I have there is that block definition is still in the DWG file,

04:35

so what I'm going to do is select the rest of them like, so, and then right click and erase the blocks like so.

04:42

Now you'll notice that that I've now got the spaces left in my drawing for those relays,

04:47

and I might create a different block to go in those gaps in the schematic drawing.

04:52

I'm not going to worry about that right now though.

04:54

What I want to do is get rid of that particular block in my D W G file.

04:59

I don't want to keep it in the D W G file.

05:02

Now I can go up to the application menu and going to drawing utilities again, and your latest purges available there in the application menu,

05:11

or instead of doing that, you can literally just type purge P U R G E like so and press enter and that will also bring up the purge dialog box.

05:21

Now the purge dialog box has gone through some changes over the years, but as you can see you now have purged items and non perjury items.

05:31

So anything that is non purge a bill you can't remove from your drawing because it's in use somewhere, but purge a ble items can be removed.

05:41

So if I expand out my blocks here by clicking on the little plus sign, you can see that we do have a relay.

05:47

R 700 block and that's the relay that we've just erased here in the drawing.

05:54

So that block is still in the drawing, we don't want it in the drawing anymore.

05:58

So we need to purge that.

06:00

Now, we've got some options here, we can confirm each item to be purged.

06:04

You can purge any nested items.

06:06

You might have blocks within blocks, nested blocks.

06:08

And also more importantly, you might have other blocks in this list that you might need to get rid of as well.

06:14

So you can just go down and tick whichever blocks you want to get rid of.

06:18

I'm going to just click the blocks category there because there's only one block.

06:22

But if I wanted to get rid of four or five non used blocks in my drawing and they were in this list,

06:27

I've just got to tick blocks and it will take all the blocks that I want to purge out.

06:32

Now I've got the option here, purge checked items, purge all that allows me to purge all unused items.

06:39

Be aware that that is kind of a cover all that does everything.

06:43

So be aware of that one.

06:44

I'm just going to purge my checked items and I'm going to get a confirmation because I've got confirmed each item to be purged selected.

06:52

So when I purge the checked items it says do I want to purge the block relay R 700.

06:59

Yes I do want to purchase this item so that's now gone and there's no more blocks to be purged out of the drawing itself.

07:06

So if I click on close now what you'll find is if I go up to the insert tab,

07:11

and then go to insert here you'll notice there's no blocks available in the drawing because I've purged those blocks out.

07:18

I can however go to the blocks palette and go here and you'll see I've got recent blocks so one of my recent blocks is the relay R. 700.

07:26

I can bring that back in like so if I want to because I've used it an auto cad, remembers it based on the blocks palette.

07:35

Now, that's great.

07:36

And also it might be in other drawings that I've used.

07:39

So potentially I can utilize things like Design center tool palettes and the blocks palette to bring a different block in to replace the block.

07:48

I've already purged.

07:50

That was a quick run through about how you can perform file maintenance with the drawing utilities in AutoCad.

07:58

What we looked at there was how we can recover a drawing file, how we can audit a drawing file and more importantly,

08:06

how we can also utilize purge in our drawing files to remove any non necessary content that we don't need.