Category Tips–n-Tricks

Happy Halloween – AutoCAD and Civil 3D Trick or Treats

I received both Tricks and Treats for AutoCAD and Civil 3D after posting for readers to send Autodesk product tips and tricks as Tricks and Treats. There are 8 tricks for AutoCAD based products and 3 treats for Civil 3D for you to try.

For the 6 people submitting these tricks and treats I will send them something fun. If they are attending Autodesk University 2013, I will give it to them there and of course buy them a beverage of their choice as a small token of thanks for participating and sharing in the fun.

Enjoy the Tricks and Treats!

Autodesk Product Trick or Treat 2013 – Share in the Fun

Last week on this Between the lines blog fun competition was announced to share Autodesk product tips and tricks in the spirit of Halloween. Autodesk Product Trick or Treats 2013 Request for Submissions

A couple great submissions have already been received. Both submitted were tricks and we need some treats to share and more products covered. Send in your trick or treats for Autodesk products lie AutoCAD, Revit, Inventor, Fusion 360, Civil 3D, InfraWorks, 3ds Max, and many more. We have thousands of daily readers of this blog and many are Autodesk product ninjas with great tricks and treats to share.

Autodesk Product Trick or Treats 2013 Request for Submissions

It is that spooky time of the year where people dress up in costumes and you guess if they are in costume, or if that is how they really look. Not many things in the office more awkward than commenting "Nice Halloween costume Kurt" and Kurt responding "what, I am not wearing a costume."

To avoid the awkward situations, why not have some fun and also help your fellow Autodesk product users such as 123D products, 360 products, 3ds Max, AutoCAD, Civil 3D, InfraWorks, Inventor, Fusion 360, Maya, Navisworks, Recap Pro and Recap Photo, Revit, Smoke, or one of the many other Autodesk products with a tip or trick?

Provide your best Autodesk product trick to fool or torture someone or a treat to help their productivity with a helpful tip or show something really cool that you created. I will with my very own personal wealth (small sandwich bag partially full of pennies, nickels, dimes and quarters hidden in my closet) purchase some fun yet inexpensive gifts to gift to some of the submitters with the best tip and the funniest and most creative submissions.

Guidelines are simple to follow as this is just for fun and not a contest or official competition.

Submit a Trick
Show how to prank someone like setting their mouse wheel zoomspeed to warp factor increments. More examples were in a past blog post AutoCAD Pranks. But please make sure the tricks are non-destructive and in the spirit of fun. NO setting their UNDO command to UNDO 3 times and save the file thus making them lose work. How about code to make their computer beep when they do something like use UNDO.

Submit a Treat
Show how to do something ninja like in an Autodesk product saving time and creating nice things. Or how about a pixel treat showing something really amazing you created using an Autodesk product.

Make sure you try to keep the Trick or Treat short and simple but yet detailed enough that people will understand it. Screen captures, sample files, scripts and LISP are welcome.

Deadline: October 29th,2013

Submit Your Entry or Entries Now
Spread the word so we gets lots of tricks and treats to share in a series of blog posts on October 31st!

Cheers,
Shaan

How to Manually Uninstall Software on Microsoft Windows

Have you ever been unable to uninstall some software, and the only thing you were accomplishing was pulling your hair out? Sometimes things happen when trying the normal uninstall method and you run into errors, and just need a fast and easy tool to remove the software application. This great tip comes from an Autodesk Knowledge Base article and applies to other Windows applications not just Autodesk products. Knowledge Base articles are published by Autodesk Support regularly based on support calls or internal discussions and research.

AutoCAD 2014 & Revit 2014 Free Book Titles Released

Longtime AutoCAD, Revit and Architecture veteran, writer, trainer, consultant, photographer,and friend David Cohn sent me a note that he has released some iBooks on AutoCAD 2014 for those of you with Apple devices. These iBooks are multimedia rich with text, images, and video. There are also Point Cloud and Revit Architecture 2014 titles available free in the iBook store by CADLearning™ by 4D Technologies.

Time Change is a Good Time to Check Your Backup Solution

Many say with the time change to Daylight Savings you should check your fire & smoke detectors, that is a great idea.

Equally as important to many with tons of data, documents, design files, photo memories and basically our digital lives is to take the time and make sure you are backing your data up, and reliably. Backup methods fail sometimes faster than a Vegas wedding, so double and triple check your backup methods and I possible don’t reply on just one as that can fail.

You should be doing these things more than twice a year with the time change but twice a year is better than never as both can cause memories to go up in flames.

AutoCAD Tip: Using an Updating Text Field to Display Area of Hatch

In this example I am using AutoCAD for Mac 2013 but it is also applicable to AutoCAD for Windows.

AutoCAD Drawing with Hatched Area

So you have an area of a drawing in AutoCAD that is closed and has a Hatch pattern applied. What you want is an easy updated way to show the area in text even when the area hatched is changed. No problem use an AutoCAD Field.