getting to important program functions in AutoCAD is done through the
application menu it’s also known as the big red a that’s up here in the top left corner it’s difficult to tell that it’s even a button but it is the application menu is where you will go to open up files to save files print files and to manage many of the settings within AutoCAD itself so to use the application menu just move your cursor up to the top left corner here into the big red a and you’ll see that little triangle it points down and we’ll see this over and over again in AutoCAD a lot of these objects here in the ribbon have a little triangle when you see that that means you can click there and it will open up a menu so if we click on the application menu it brings this up and you’ll see a lot of different things here in this window here we have the new open save and save as options these are fairly self-explanatory if you want to start a new file you will click new if you want to open an existing file click open if you want to save your drawing or if you want to save as you know save it as a different name now there are many ways to use your drawing one way is to print it out which will cover extensively in a later chapter but you might be surprised at how difficult it can actually be to print a drawing and that’s okay that’s where the publish in the print to come into play we’ll talk about those later on in a much greater detail so you’ll understand there is a difference between print and publish however is just the way to get your electronic file into a different format and it could be hard copy on paper or it could be in some other electronic format for other people to look at and manipulate the export command is meant to put your autocad file into some sort of digital format it kind of works similarly to the print and publish commands we’ll talk about them a little bit later but this will export your autocad file into a different file format like a PDF file that you can email to a client or a vendor so you’ll just come here export and click PDF then we have different formats some of them come from Autodesk themselves like the d WF d WF x or 3d DWF and these file types are very similar to a PDF
though they’re more autocad like so if you’ve used autocad you can use a DWF reviewer software program called design review that’s free it comes from
Autodesk but there are other formats here as well like dgn that’s a different CAD file type that is used by many different programs FBX is another file type that you can make and there are other formats you can click here and it will bring up some options for you to choose from and you can see here you can save your file however you want to save it or export it click down here on this bar you’ll see the little triangle again that indicates that there’s more choices and these are the different file types you can save it as dgn file DWG file dxx eps even a bitmap file IGS files etc now the drawing utilities feature has many tools in it now if we come back up here to the application menu and we see here the drawing utilities now you notice on all of these options here I can click on either one of these buttons and this will start the new command for example and that will just bring up a list of template files that I can go from
but you’ll also notice when I go up to the application menu and I can see this button here when I hover over the new it populates a list of new options and same thing with open that populates different open options so I can open up some sample files online I can open up a dgn file a sheet set or drawing from the cloud from our Autodesk 360 account or just the regular autocad drawing now this save doesn’t have any options to it but save as does and we can save it as a lot of different file types here’s the export button which we already looked at published in print we’re going to look at those later but now drawing utilities we have a lot of different options here we can look at drawing properties this will set and display different bits of information about our file
this is what you get it’s very similar to selecting the file in windows
explorer now you can add all of this to it that you want
we go back to our drawing utilities we see our list here is populated and we have units we can audit the file which will help us look at the data that’s in the file and it will see if anything is corrupted or messed up so a lot of times autocad will crash on you and when it does it could mess up your file so you’ll want to run what’s called an audit autocad will scan the file say hey look there are errors and we’re going to fix those for you the status gives you the drawing status and modes bits of information about your file that you might need to know purge will help clean it the recover works similarly to an audit sometimes it just gets messed up and so you can’t open a file because it has been corrupted that’s rare but it does happen then you want to run the recover option and so you hit recover and then we’ll tell you to open up the file and it will run an audit before it fully opens the drawing for you and fix errors that comes in handy when you can’t open the file because it has too many errors again this is extremely rare but if that is the case then you may want to come here so the recover and audit are similar but you run the audit on a file you currently have open and you’re running recover on a file you can’t open or don’t have open here we have opened the drawing recovery manager this is a manager where you can go and recover multiple files at one time instead of doing one at a time and we have recover and recover with xrefs when we reference a file to one of our other files we’ll talk about that part later on you know it could have errors in it luckily though that rarely happens there are two icons near the top of the application menu these two icons will list either all of the drawings that you have currently opened which is this one here on the right and if I select it you’ll see I only have the one drawing open drawing number one so this is nice because it will give you a list of everything you have if we click here this will give you a list of drawings that you’ve had open recently and if you hover over them it will give you a preview so you get an idea of what they look like this here will open up options now we’re going to go into options here in there through the different lessons and if I tell you to open up options that’s one way to get to it remember one thing you’re going to find out about AutoCAD is there are million different ways to do the exact same thing the way I prefer to go to options though is to just type in 0 p for options and press Enter that will bring you up to a lot of different settings here that you have to control the way autocad runs to control the way it looks and control how you interact with it we’re only going to tweak it a little bit here in there now autocad can do a lot of search for you right within the command line and we’ll talk about the command line later on if you like to use the ribbon and you want to use it more often because you’re more comfortable that way and you can’t find a command just go up to the
application menu and in this top bar right here it’s a flashing cursor and it’s there by default when you start the application menu well there you can do a search for commands so let’s look for say data extract you see here when I start typing in the commands it’s searching for it and it finds it there’s extract data and there’s data extraction but you can see these three commands are really the exact same command they’re just found in different places this one is found on the ribbon tab insert and then if you come down here it says linking and extraction extract data this one is found on the annotate tab on the ribbon this is just the command so that means you can enter the command on the command line or you can go to either of these two ribbon tabs and find the command now one thing that’s really cool is it okay i found the command I don’t want to go looking for now I can just click and it starts the command and next to the application menu is the quack that stands for the quick access toolbar that’s this guy right here this is a very handy tool bar and one that has a lot of commands in it this toolbar is meant to hold commands that you need frequently there are some default commands that you can turn on or off in it and it’s easily customized so here we have the new command and a lot of these commands are also found right here in the application menu you’ll see it looks very similar and the icons are even the same this is the icon for new
this is the icon for open it looks like a file folder that you’re opening the save command is to an old floppy disk the Save icon save as as a little pencil this one is a printer and so it prints we have undue and we have redo here we have our work spaces and we’ll talk about workspaces later on if you want to add more commands through the Quattro the quick access toolbar you can click on the more tools button if you click right here this little arrow everything with a check by it is turned on the ones that don’t have checks on them mean they’re not turned on but they’re available I like to have the match properties turned on so I’m going to click it and turn it on and here it is right there so you can see that you can customize the quick access toolbar very easily now if there are some commands in here that you want to use but aren’t in here you can go to more commands and this will bring up a small version of the custom user interface to customize it essentially you can find anyone you want I’m going to click 3d marriages because it’s here I’m going to left click and hold and then drag it up put it where I want to in the quick access toolbar and then release and it drops it right in there now I have very quick access to the 3d mirror button when you’re finished click OK and now it’s been saved so if you accidentally put something on there you don’t like you can right click on the quick access toolbar and say remove from quick access toolbar it’s that simple
and I can come here and say remove so that one goes away now if I right click up here I can add a separator to help you organize your commands once again get to that customization or i can show the quick access toolbar below the ribbon so if i want it down here that’s fine there’s a lot of these tools you can use while you work inside autocad and that’s okay so you can put it down here if you’d like to I prefer it up there just right click on it again and then select the show quick access toolbar above the ribbon so that’s the quick access toolbar in the application menu
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