AutoCAD 2008

Meticulously refined with the designer in mind, AutoCAD® software propels day-to-day drafting forward with features that increase speed and accuracy while saving time.

Ditch excess RegApps & Speed Up Your Drawings

So you have this drawing, and despite clearing our your Annotative Scale List, running the PURGE command, even clearing out your layer filters the gosh darn drawing is still slower than a herd of turtles stampeding through peanut butter.  And even after all of that, your drawing is still 1 MB in size – what …

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Layer Properties Per Viewport

For the past couple weeks The CAD Geek Blog has been rather quiet.  Rest assured I haven’t abandoned my little corner of the CAD blogosphere, but rather took a little end-of-year vacation (Dec 17-Jan 1).  I started my vacation with grand plans of blogging almost non-stop, and finding new ways to break AutoCAD and Civil 3D.  What actually happened was a lot of Christmas shopping, followed by a number of excursions.

Proclaimed as the birthplace of the Tacky Christmas Light Tour, I had a chance to visit the many tacky homes in and around Richmond, VA.  My mothers home is among those on the Richmond Tacky Light Tour.  Getting Christmas off to a somewhat comical start was me attempting to calculate and balance the electrical load for her light display.  2-30 Amp and 2-20 Amp breakers later – we had lights!

Other highlights of my long Christmas break included visiting Baltimore, MD for their Miracle on 34th Street; Newport News, VA for their Celebration in Lights, and Virginia Beach, VA for their Holiday Lights on the Boardwalk.  Finally I had the pleasure of bringing in the new year with my favorite band – Carbon Leaf.  Needless to say, all that fun didn’t leave much time for blogging.  But 2008 is here, and so am I!

AutoCAD 2008 introduced a handy feature for managing layers properties on a viewport-by-viewport basis.  Pre-2008 we could only freeze and thaw per viewport, but now we can change Color, Linetype, Lineweight, and Plot Style.  In the short time we have had 2008 installed, the feature has already proven helpful a number of times.  So just how does one use this feature?

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Make an Entire DWG Annotative

While I was unable to get a blog post put together last week, I did manage to finish developing a course on Annotative Scaling for my firms internal training program.  One nifty discovery I came across in developing the course was the variable ANNOTATIVEDWG.  So what exactly does this guy do? Quite simply – it …

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Better than AUDIT, Better than RECOVER, the new RECOVERALL

Yesterday morning got out to a rather chaotic start for me. Within the first couple hours of the day I had 3 support requests in queue, all urgent, and for a mid-day submittal. Not to bore you with details, but essentially one was related to Sheet Set Manager crashing in the middle of the job. The second with AutoCAD only plotting the viewport, and not the titleblock.  Putting the icing on the cake was the final request where the user couldn’t even get into her drawing (even after running a RECOVER).

So why am I boring you with my morning activities?

All mind you without the aid of coffee.

My reason it simple – the solution for each of the above support requests ended up being the same. Those familiar with troubleshooting quirky drawing behavior are likely yelling two commands at the monitor about now; AUDIT and RECOVER. Both of which have been my best friends when troubleshooting such issues in the past.

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Perpetual Annotation Scale List

annotation scales

In just the last few days alone I have received 5 support requests from my users about this issue. Seeing that I haven?t seen a lot written about it, I thought I would make a quick post about the Perpetual Annotation Scale List bug in AutoCAD 2008. This issue is most often noticed when users click on the “Annotation Scale” list from the drawing status bar. Generally this list simply contains a list of commonly used drawing scales. On the other hand; if you’re not careful this list can soon be plagued with “_XREF” scales.

What?s happening here is both your host drawing and your reference drawing contain these annotation scales. Suddenly once you attach a couple external references, your Annotation Scale List is virtually unusable. The screen shot above shows one example of this. I write this post with both good and bad news.

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Quickly Link Excel Tables to AutoCAD

Since being posted back in April my post titled Linking Excel and AutoCAD with Data Links has been one of the most visited pages here on The CAD Geek Blog. In that post I go through what I will call the manual way of linking an Excel table to AutoCAD. Thus unless you are a part of the Slowskey family, you’ll likely prefer this quicker more efficient way of making the link.

  1. Start off in Excel by simply selecting the cells you want to link to AutoCAD. Right-click and select “Copy“. This will place the Excel table on your clipboard so we can paste it into AutoCAD.
  2. Open the AutoCAD drawing you wish to insert your Excel table into, and go to the “Edit” menu, selecting “Paste Special”.
  3. From the resulting dialog box, Select the “Paste Link” radio button, and then select “AutoCAD Entities” under the “As” heading.

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Upgrading to AutoCAD 2008

Alas – my firm has finished our AutoCAD 2008 upgrade. In the timeframe of about a month we upgraded a little more than 250 users in our 7 engineering offices. Some would call the mere thought of upgrading that many users in such a short timeframe crazy, but even still we did it. Thankfully we have two individuals (including myself) dedicated as full-time CAD Managers, and an awesome IT helpdesk and infrastructure staff to back us. Each year as the new release of AutoCAD nears; bloggers and columnists such as me begin building quite a hype for the upcoming release. Oftentimes such articles and such are written using beta releases of the software. To be frankly honest the articles almost always celebrate everything about the software, consequently making users drool for that cool new feature such as Sheet Set Manager, or in 2008 Annotative Scaling.

The superstitious AutoCAD users out there will not upgrade to an odd numbered release of AutoCAD. That superstition likely stems back to Release 13 which was not an overly celebrated release in industry. To make things interesting Autodesk has changed the way they market their AutoCAD releases. We now refer to things as AutoCAD 200_, not AutoCAD Release _ _. Thus depending on how you count; AutoCAD 2008 could be considered both an even and odd release. The year 2008 is of course even, but its official release is 17.1 which is odd.

As anyone who has used AutoCAD for some time now knows, pre-release demos, and post-release deployments and real-world usage are two totally different things. Those of us in the Civil field know that feeling all too well, as Autodesk Civil 3D 2004 was the greatest thing had an incredible WOW factor associated with it. Of course as we got our hands on the product and started using it, we soon discovered the product was not yet mature enough to sustain real-world design. Thankfully Civil 3D has come a long way since then, maturing to the point where real-world design is now possible. Even still a bigger question remains, what’s up with AutoCAD 2008?

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Multileaders – Part 2

Flowers at the Elizabethan Gardens After a much needed and most enjoyable vacation to the Outer Banks of North Carolina, I am back in the office. My first two days back to the office have been both busy and exciting, as Monday kicked off our AutoCAD 2008 upgrade training and deployment. Two offices down – five more to go. Needless to say July is going to be an incredibly busy month. Regardless of how busy or chaotic the month may become, it’s all still incredibly exciting as the users I support will be able to take advantage of the seemingly endless list of new features I have been blogging about for months now. If the excitement I have received while conducting upgrade training is any indication, multileaders are destined to become an indispensible tool within AutoCAD.

My previous post on multileaders effectively provided a quick onceover of the new multileader feature. As you will find in using multileaders, they put the aging quick leader on the fast-track to retirement. Their power is truly harnessed in their versatility.

Creating a basic multileader really isn’t all that different from our old friend, the quick leader. As mentioned in my last post multileaders are their own little piece of AutoCAD. I restate fundamental fact as a common misconception is that multileaders are configured with dimension styles. Although a multileader, and quick leader look a lot alike, their similarities end there. Multileaders are configured in their own interface, which I discussed in part 1 of this series.

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