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AutoCAD

Distributing and Sharing eTransmit Transmittal Settings with your Team

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With the many resource files necessary to display many AutoCAD drawings, sending your DWG files to an external consultant can prove to be a challenging endeavor. Of course this was the very reason Autodesk introduced the ETRANSMIT command to AutoCAD many versions ago. Although the ETRANSMIT command isn’t the most complex command in AutoCAD, it … Read more

Complete list of AutoCAD 2014 Service Packs and Updates

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If you have any of the following products installed, there’s a good chance you’ve already received an in-product notification letting you know an update is available for your product. Nonetheless, sticking with the typical cadence, Autodesk has released a series of Service Packs for several of the 2014 products they shipped this past spring. The … Read more

Converting External Reference Path Types with Action Macro’s

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In my last blog post I wrote about the new External Reference tools you (probably) didn’t know about in AutoCAD 2014. As someone who uses external references nearly everyday, it goes without saying these new features are among my favorites in this release. More specifically, the ability to convert full path references to relative path … Read more

Identify Drawing Changes with AutoCAD

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Despite our best efforts to avoid it, at some point in a project you’ll likely end up with two drawing files that are supposed to be the same, but aren’t. After running into this issue several times over the years, I learned about the incredible “Compare” feature within the Autodesk Design Review application. Although this … Read more

Capture AutoCAD Workflows with Project Chronicle

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Given the wide breadth of tools and commands inside products such as AutoCAD and Autodesk Revit, it can oftentimes be difficult to communicate the exact steps necessary to reproduce a procedure. Regardless if you’re requesting help or providing it, a missed or slightly altered step can mean the difference between solving an issue or it … Read more

Learn to go Beyond AutoCAD, and Save the World

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AutoCAD has been recognized as the industry-leading architecture and engineering documentation platform for thirty years now. The thing is, the last several years have seen the AutoCAD platform extend beyond simple 2D design documentation. AutoCAD 2010, 2011, and even 2012 each saw the introduction of some incredible 3D modeling tools. Beyond the AutoCAD platform itself, the introduction of Design Suites just last year means many AutoCAD users now have access to a portfolio of tools that were previously cost prohibitive.

Trouble is, despite all of these notable advancements, there’s the unfortunate truth that many of these tools become what I like to call “shelfware”. That is tools, which no matter how incredible they may be, stay affixed on the shelf, verses helping me achieve my design objectives.

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Automate Sheet Setup with Action Macros

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Although there’s no shortage of ways to customize AutoCAD, nearly every one requires some familiarity with programming. Given the barriers of learning a programming language, I find so many of the AutoCAD users I come across simply survive with the tools they already have verses learning to create new ones. This is the fundamental reason I love Action Macro’s so much; they allow users, with or without programming experience, to create new AutoCAD tools in an instant.

The beauty of Action Macros is the way that anyone who can use the command line inside AutoCAD can also customize AutoCAD. Given how simple they are to create, I have found a wide range of ways to create and apply Action Macros over the years. One of my longtime favorites is using them to automate the setup and creation of new drawing sheets.

The best way to ensure all of the sheets for a project plot the same is to create every sheet from a common layout template with the same page setup applied. While the procedure for doing this isn’t especially hard, it does involve several steps, and frequently becomes cluttered among the library of different sheet sizes used by most companies (Letter, Ledger, Arch D, etc). Using Action Macros I can dramatically simplify this process by creating a series of custom commands that will automatically create a new layout tab at the desired size.

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