Lynn Allen’s Top 10 Tips for AutoCAD® 2005 Software
Tip # 1: Step Savers

RIGHT-CLICK ENTER
AutoCAD 2000 introduced the right-click shortcut menus for quick access to many valuable options. Many users turned these menus off because they preferred using their right mouse button as an Enter key. Now with AutoCAD 2005 you can have the best of both worlds!

1. OPTIONS command
2. User Preferences tab
3. Right-click Customization option—turn on “time-sensitive right-click”




4. Here you can set your input device so that a fast right-click functions like hitting Enter. Holding down the button will display a shortcut menu.

NEW OBJECT SNAP!
The new object snap “Mid between 2 points” eliminates the need to create construction lines. Access it from the right-click OSNAP menu or by keying in M2P.

NEW ZOOM OPTION
The new Zoom Object option allows you to quickly zoom to a selected object.

EDITING STEP SAVERS
The Copy command now defaults to Multiple copies (hoorah!).

DDEDIT now works on both text and attributes (so you don’t even have to know which is which).

Fillet and Chamfer have a new Multiple option to repeat.

Remove an extra step in PEDIT (Polyline Editing)

• Setting the new system variable PEDITACCEPT to 1 will eliminate the needless question “Object selected is not a polyline, do you want to turn it into one?”

MATCHPROP now supports additional settings for polylines and viewports. This makes it possible to match such features as polyline widths and viewport scale factors.

QSELECT has a new drop-down list for block names, giving you easy access.

HATCH STEP SAVERS
New DRAWORDER Setting in BHATCH
The new updated Boundary Hatch command has an option to control the draw order of the hatch object. By default, the hatch pattern will be drawn behind the boundary, making it much easier to select the boundary for editing purposes.

Hatch an area even if there’s a gap!
The new Gap tolerance option in the Boundary Hatch command allows you to instruct AutoCAD to hatch an area, even if it’s not completely closed. Simply specify a suitable gap tolerance value for your drawing. Think of all the steps this will save!

DRAWORDER STEP SAVERS

1. No more regenerating your drawing to see the results of the DRAWORDER command
2. If you create a new object based on an existing one, the DRAWORDER properties are also inherited (including copy, fillet, explode, etc).
3. DRAWORDER now has a better memory! It will remember the display order every time you leave the drawing and return (super important with xrefs).