While reviewing an E-News Letter recently from our Autodesk vendor I came across an interesting link in their featured Blog posts that took me to an Autodesk help site. Here I found a help series labeled “The Hitchhikers Guide to AutoCAD“. Now if you are new to AutoCAD or have been a long time circle and line jock, but not much on more advanced features, this might be a good spot to start your climb. This does not by any means have the info to make you an advanced Rock Star AutoCAD user, but if there is one or more areas that you have not ventured in to, like creating your own Blocks, using Paper Space, using multileaders or Mtext, in lieu of the old Dtext that so many still use, these are straightforward, easy to understand mini-tutorials on how to so these things.
Below is a basic capture of the home screen and the cool graphic that they use.
Welcome to The Hitchhiker’s Guide to AutoCAD—your guide to the basic 42 commands you need to create 2D drawings using modern AutoCAD or AutoCAD LT.
This guide is a great place to get started if you just completed your initial training, or to refresh your memory if you only use AutoCAD occasionally. As you can see from the illustration, the 42 commands are grouped together according to types of activity. In addition, these groups are arranged sequentially to follow a typical workflow.
- Basics: Review the basic ways to control AutoCAD.
- Viewing: Pan and zoom in a drawing, and control the order of overlapping objects.
- Geometry: Create basic geometric objects such as lines, circles, and solid-filled areas.
- Precision: AutoCAD provides several features to ensure the precision required for your models.
- Layers and Properties: Organize your drawing by assigning objects to layers, and by assigning properties such as color and linetype to objects.
- Modifying: Perform editing operations such as erase, move, and trim on the objects in a drawing.
- Blocks: Insert symbols and details into your drawings from commercial online sources or from your own designs.
- Layouts: Display one or more scaled views of your design on a standard-size drawing sheet called a layout.
- Notes and Labels: Create notes, labels, bubbles, and callouts. Save and restore style settings by name.
- Dimensions: Create several types of dimensions and save dimension settings by name.
- Printing: Save and restore the printer settings for each layout. Output a drawing layout to a printer, a plotter, or a file.
Link: The Hitchhikers Guide to AutoCAD
If you are new to AutoCAD or a casual user, I highly recommend you check this out!
Once you have checked it out and let me know what you think!
WES
