One of the many unfinished aspects of the AutoCAD 2009 Ribbon is the lack of Express Tools content. One enterprising user has put the effort into correcting this, and has posted an Express Tools CUI replacement in this Autodesk newsgroup thread. I have not tested this myself. As usual with CUI, be paranoid. Back up [...]

AutoCAD 2009 users, I strongly suggest you go and set the new system variable OPENPARTIAL to 0. Now.
Why? Because if it’s set to the default value of 1, purging can be harmful to your drawings. I’ll fill in the details in a future Bug Watch column, but for now I suggest you just go and [...]

I see Lynn Allen has written a post explaining how to restore the “classic” interface. I commend Lynn for doing this in response to the requests she’s been receiving. It must be pretty painful for some people at Autodesk to see their Technical Evangelist showing people how to turn off AutoCAD 2009’s Big New Feature, [...]

If you saw my post or Shaan Hurley’s post about this utility and grabbed it on or before 27 April, please go and grab it again. It’s been updated to fix a couple of bugs.

If you’re an AutoCAD 2008 user you probably already know what the title refers to. If not, you probably don’t need to know. If your drawings are afflicted, I suggest you hop over to Between the Lines, grab the scale list cleanup utility and start cleaning up. Although I’ve found that this utility works very [...]

Greg Robinson, who I had the pleasure of meeting at Autodesk some 11 years ago in the run-up to Release 14, has started a Wiki for AutoLISP and other AutoCAD-based source code. I’m a big fan of LISP in AutoCAD, so I’m happy to see this resource available for users.
It’s in its infancy right now, [...]

In the general scheme of things, this is a relatively trivial issue, but it’s sometimes the little things that get under my skin. Winner of this year’s prize for most annoying new feature just has to be the new tooltips. They are really not good for my mental health. If I have tooltips turned on, [...]

I’ve seen quite a few positive comments about the new automated spell checking feature, with some people saying that it alone is enough to make AutoCAD 2009 worth the price of admission. I wouldn’t go quite that far, but it is a nice feature. If you enter or edit text or mtext, a little dashed [...]

If you’ve noticed some normal drafting operations are much slower in AutoCAD 2009 than in earlier releases, try turning off the new Layer Palette and see if the problem goes away. For example, editing viewports with the Layer Palette visible can be completely unworkable. Don’t just auto-hide it, close it altogether.
Another problem presented by the [...]

One of the banes of AutoCAD over the past few years is the phenomenon of the half-baked feature. A new feature is added to the product with serious design deficiencies and/or bugs and other shortcomings that make it much less useful than it should have been. I’m sure you have your own favourite examples of [...]

One thing that’s regularly asked whenever a new AutoCAD release hits the streets is how to make it work like the last release. I think you should give any new features a fighting chance before turning them off or ignoring them, but that’s entirely your choice. Let’s assume you’ve made the decision to go back [...]

You may be used to accessing pull-down menus with Alt-key combinations, e.g. Alt+F to get at the File menu. You can still use those keystrokes to get at menus in AutoCAD 2009, whether or not the pull-down menus are in place. If the pull-downs are visible (MENUBAR=1), they are given priority over the Menu Browser. [...]

One more feature that’s crammed into the Menu Browser pane’s limited space is the Open Documents list. This allows you to switch between the drawings you currently have open. It has a similar interface to the Recent Documents list, including the persistently pale preview:

Unlike Recent Documents, the filenames are displayed in the correct case, although [...]

In a comment on my Five More Simple Tips for AutoCAD post, Jeremy had some questions about the Oops command. I thought I would explain the command in more detail in another post so more people will see it.
The first thing to understand is that Oops varies from Undo/U in that it only reverses those [...]

How do you turn the new screen elements on and off using the keyboard? How about the not-so-new ones? See this table:

Element
On
Off
Toggle

Advanced Render Settings
RPPREF
RPPREFCLOSE
 

Clean Screen
CLEANSCREENON
CLEANSCREENOFF
Ctrl+0

Command line
COMMANDLINE
COMMANDLINEHIDE
Ctrl+9

dbConnect
DBCONNECT
DBCCLOSE
Ctrl+6

DesignCenter
ADCENTER
ADCCLOSE
Ctrl+2

Layer palette
LAYER
LAYERCLOSE
 

Lights
LIGHTLIST
LIGHTLISTCLOSE
 

Markup Set Manager
MARKUP
MARKUPCLOSE
Ctrl+7

Materials
MATERIALS
MATERIALSCLOSE
 

Menu bar
MENUBAR 1
MENUBAR 0
 

NavCube
NAVCUBEDISPLAY 1
NAVCUBEDISPLAY 0
 

Properties palette
PROPERTIES
PROPERTIESCLOSE
Ctrl+1

Quick calc
QUICKCALC
QCCLOSE
Ctrl+8

Ribbon
RIBBON
RIBBONCLOSE
 

Rollover tool tips
ROLLOVERTIPS 1
ROLLOVERTIPS 0
 

Sheet Set Manager
SHEETSET
SHEETSETHIDE
Ctrl+4

Status bar
STATUSBAR 1
STATUSBAR 0
 

Status bar
tray icons
TRAYICONS 1
TRAYICONS [...]

More simple AutoCAD tips, as promised:

If you erase some objects, draw a few things and then want your erased objects back without losing the things you drew in the meantime, enter OOPS rather than undoing the commands.
At any Select objects: prompt, you can select using a triangle, non-orthogonal rectangle or other odd shapes, by entering [...]

As my forced change to a different blog theme (thanks IE7) has meant the demise of my random AutoCAD tip feature, you may as well have the tips in a blog post instead. Here are the first five. These are fairly simple tips that apply to all recent releases. You probably know most of them, [...]

If you are thinking of putting yourself or your company out there with your own domain name (e.g. cadnauseam.com), there are many, many sites out there that allow you to enter a domain name and see if it’s available. Don’t use them.
Why not? Because some of those sites will then immediately register that domain. You [...]

In AutoCAD, when you have a drawing open and you go to open another, does Open automatically scroll down and highlight your current drawing?

This can be very handy when you’re working your way though a set of drawings. If this isn’t happening for you, here’s how to make it do so.

In Explorer, go to Tools [...]

I have registered the domain name blognauseam.com because:
a) it will stop anybody else grabbing it; and
b) it will make it easier for people to remember the URL if they don’t have me bookmarked.
No changes are required to your bookmarks or links, I just redirected blognauseam.com to blog.cadnauseam.com and will continue to use blog.cadnauseam.com.
That leads me [...]