Taking shortcuts in life will sometimes come back to bite you. But there are some areas in life where shortcuts come in handy and make you more productive. In AutoCAD there are shortcut keys that you can use to increase your speed and productivity. Many old-time CADD jockeys are very familiar with using shortcut keys either through CTRL keys and Function keys or through the ACAD.PGP file.
If you are one of the newer generations CADD Jedis that were trained in AutoCAD to do 95% of your work with mouse points and clicks – A faster way there is! You may think you’re pretty productive that way, but adding in some shortcut keys can further improve your performance.
In this post I’m going to show the CTRL keys that are probably the most commonly used:
CTRL 1: Toggles the Properties Palette
CTRL C: Copies objects to the Windows clipboard
CTRL F: Toggle running object snaps
CTRL L: Toggles Orthomode
CTRL N: Creates a new drawing
CTRL O: Displays the Open Dialog
CTRL P: Displays the Plot Dialog
CTRL S: Saves the current drawing
CTRL Shift S: Displays the save as dialog box
CTRL V: Paste data from windows clipboard
CTRL shift V: Pastes data from windows clipboard as a block (Use this sparingly)
CTRL X: Cuts objects from the current drawing to the Windows clipboard
CTRL Z: Reverse the last action (UNDO)
Some other shortcuts that are Non-CTRL keys:
F1: Displays help
F2: Toggles the text window (Very helpful when troubleshooting)
F3: Toggles Osnap
F8: Toggles Orthomode
Note that CTRL C, X, and V and F1 should be part of your everyday Windows toolkit. You can use this in all your office apps and most any program that allows copying, pasting and cutting – it is nearly universal. No more sliding up to the Edit menu and selecting copy, paste or cut.
As with the CTRL keys above these are not the only shortcut keys available in AutoCAD but more of a sampling of the ones I think that will help increase your productivity.
If you’re looking for a way to boost your performance try taking CTRL of AutoCAD. In a future post I’ll talk about ACAD.PGP file which takes shortcut keys to a whole other level.
I would be curious to know how many people are already using these keys regularly – drop me an email if you are and which ones you find most useful.
WES
