Tips You Love for Using Autodesk Products

I Love Autodesk Product Tips

Since it is Valentines Day tomorrow, I decided to give away a free license of SnagIt for PC or Mac to the best tip posted as a comment to this post.

Post your Autodesk product tip you love by tomorrow February 14th 2013 at 10am PST.

15 comments

In Autodesk Revit, if you are using Design Options, be sure to create a unique view for each Design Option within a set. Then, in each view, set the Visibility graphics to display the Design Option is correlates to. You’ll save yourself a major headache this way.

Using DWG Convert functionality in DWG TrueView application, we can easily perfrom batch operations such as purging, checking & fixing errors, binding external refs etc. in addition to converting drawing format in multiple drawings. There are many other operations available over there, but these are my farourites. You may find this tool very handy during the final submission of drawings at the end of a project.

For AutoCAD, if you need to bind an xref and it fails to bind, use the QSELECT command to quickly find the culprit. Open the xref, type QSELECT, highlight the object type you suspect is causing the problem (in my case its always an ACAD_PROXY_ENTITY). Click ok. And then explode it, or delete it, or whatever you need to do. This command has saved me countless hours and headaches.

In AutoCAD, if you need to bind and xref and it fails to bind, use the QSELECT command to quickly find the culprit. Open the xref, type QSELECT, highlight the object type you think is causing the problem (for me it’s always ACAD_PROXY_ENTITY). Click ok. Then explode the selection (this always works for me), or delete it, or do whatever your job requires to get the xref to bind. Remember to save and reload the xref before trying to bind it again.

Setup Named Views to quickly switch between plan view rotations in a base drawing.

Use the ALIGNSPACE command to quickly setup viewports rotated to objects in modelspace.

Create a custom or enterprise cui to autoload on everyone’s computer with a change in one network location.

In AutoCAD, you can cycle through each entity beneath the pickbox during object selection to get the specific entity you want in a crowded drawing without needing to mess around zooming in and back out. If selection preview is enabled, you can press – to cycle through the available entities. If selection preview is disabled, you can hold the key and left-click to cycle through the available entities.
SnagIt, will you be my Valentine?

Jennnifer Hoskens says:

When you start AutoCAD and attempt to open a file, and instead of giving you a dialog box to navigate to your .dwg, you are prompted at the command line to enter a the file path and name to open the file. The tip to change this command prompt back to a dialog box is the command variable FILEDIA. Typing this at the command line and setting it back to 1 will bring your dialog box back when opening files. The most common cause of FILEDIA getting set to 0 is a crash.

Carets got stripped in my comment. Should be “you can press <Shift>-<Space>” and “you can hold the <Shift> key”.

Need to point your network installs to a new server host-name then use a Group Policy on your Windows Domain and set the System Environment Variable ADSK_LICSENSE_FILE to @servername. If you have multiple servers you can specify more than one in order @servername1,@servername2. This will save you time if you need to change this on many workstations.

Thank you for the tips everyone. The time has been reached and I am now looking through tips an will select a tip to give the author a license of Snagit compliments of Techsmith.
I will give away a license of Camtasia and also Mindjet in the near future.
Cheers,
Shaan

Alex Lepeska says:

The command line can be quite unwieldy with over 1300 commands and variables at your disposal. The good thing is that you have a method of narrowing down that command that isn’t quite at the tip of your finger. You can cycle through the unknowns to find the right one. Enter the first (or several) characters and press [TAB] to cycle between commands!

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