while working in AutoCAD there are many things that you need to be aware of the status bar is a sort of billboard that displays information it’s a
communication center for you it’s a located at the bottom of the screen and stretches all the way across that’s down here starts on the Left goes all the way to the right each one of those icons and glyphs will give you information that tells you what things are going on what things aren’t and where you’re at etc it’s a communication center a heads-up display we’re just going to look at all these and very quickly go through them one at a time on the left it may seem kind of obvious what this is these are your drawing coordinates and if your tool tips are turned on you can hover over any of these icons and it will give you the command name or the function name that it represents as you move your cursor around you’ll see that those coordinates change so it’s telling you where you’re at in your drawing AutoCAD is based on in a Cartesian coordinate system and it’s called the world coordinate system and it just goes with an x and y coordinate system and for autocad LT and then autocad as an XYZ so it’s kind of cently telling you where you’re at this will help you keep track of your position if you need to
determine the coordinates of an object in your drawing
you can place your crosshair there for example right here that’s where you are as you move you can get the coordinates for all the end points for this
rectangle very handy very quick and easy to use next you’ll see the toggle status icons we talked about these in a previous section where you can press your f1 keys f2 f3 etc to toggle some features off and on well instead of using the function keys you can also just click on these icons when they’re highlighted with this blue background color that means they’re turned on when they’re just gray that means they’re off this first button here is for the inference trains this is only an autocad autocad LT doesn’t have them but constraints will control your line work it will keep things as you can see here in the parametric tab in the ribbon locked into position keeps them
perpendicular keep some horizontal parallel etc
that turns it off and on the next one is a snap mode
let’s turn on
can see AutoCAD will snap to your grid settings now those are going to depend on your exact settings and how big they are the spacing right now is point 5 units for x and y so every half of a unit I’m snapping into position if I draw a line
you can see I’m snapping to these points on my grid
now this is a nice tool to use that will help you draw very accurately with little effort but it also limits you to drawing on that grid but if that’s what you need to do then that’s a very easy way to draw that’s toggled off and on here next one is the grid you see the grid background here is on right now I can toggle that off so that it’s just a gray background a lot of times it can be distracting for people and other times it can be very useful it’s up to you the next icon is ortho mode we press the f8 to toggle that off and on or you can just click it off and on here the next one is polar tracking
and then oh snap so your object snaps by pressing f3 or clicking here 3d oh snaps an AutoCAD your oh snap tracking typically I will leave this on because I find those tool oh snap tracking to be very useful and all of these again we’re going to go into greater detail much later on this one is your dynamic UCS the dynamic UCS is used in 3d modeling and AutoCAD but not an AutoCAD LT it allows you to dynamically are
automatically switch your coordinate system to match the face of an object you’ve picked
one is your dynamic input the dynamic input is where your crosshairs will display sort of mini command line function now I have it turned off have it turned on I like this on because typically I need to know what’s going on where I’m drawing at that makes it useful I don’t have to look in two different places to get the information that I need so I like to use it other users find the extra text and prompts inconvenient and cluttering the drawing so it’s up to you I suggest you use it or at least give it a try but it’s up to you this option will show your line wait we’ll talk about it later but that has to do with printing what’s it going to look like when you print how thick or your lines going to be this will give you an indication on the screen if you have something set up to be a thicker line this is with the transparency setting again another function will talk about later but you can make objects transparent translucent opaque you can see through them especially in a hatch that works quite well so if i have this solid it’s at full transparency meaning it’s set to zero meaning it has no transparency at all it’s full solidness but as i increase the transparency up to a factor of 90 you can see it kind of fades and I can see things through it and if I draw a line through this hatch area
you can see it
parents he offer on by
the switch here or at the button any object that has transparency assigned to it will be transparent is a quick properties know if you press control one it opens up your properties palette
is a lot of information on your object times you don’t need all of that information but if I pick something I get my quick properties palette
it’s a properties palette for that object it just gives you a basic three or four line bit of information
typically most of what you’re going to need I can change the color of the object right here to change the layer I can change the line type so whatever I need it to be right here on the fly I can close this or i can press escape to let go of the object each one of these looks a little bit different because it will depend on which type of object you select and if you pick more than one then it will only display the properties that they have in common lines and circles are two different types of objects so it will display different things some people find this useful and again other people like to turn it off it’s up to you I prefer to turn it off because I typically keep my properties palette open all the time while I’m working so the quick properties just gets in my way but if you’re not that type of a worker then it’ll probably be very useful
next is the selection cycling
very useful as I go to pick something that’s on top of something else I may find this little glyph you see that little blue box it’s hard to see but it’s showing up that means there’s more than one object here on top of each other all right right here at this intersection I have this red phantom line this white continuous line in the hatch pattern autocad doesn’t really know which one I want so it will pick whatever is on top that’s according to the drawer adoro again we’ll get more detail into that but if I don’t know what to pick you know it’s on the bottom I can’t pick it that’s where selection cycling can come in handy so I left click and AutoCAD tells me there’s a red line there’s a white poly line and there’s a white hatch which one of these do I want to pick
I select hatch and now i can delete it or whatever it is that i wish to do to it so that’s very useful especially in a very busy or complex drawing rehab things over the top of each other getting in the way so in right undo this and let’s say i want to edit not the polyline but the hatch pattern why do i do that well I pic with my selection cycling polylines on top so that’s what I would have picked if I add that turned off so let’s turn that off real quick now if I come here to pick I’m getting just the polyline it’s a bear how do I get this hatch pattern it can be a pain I don’t want that i want the hatch pattern so selection cycling can be very useful and very helpful with that now this last button here the annotation monitor if i turn it on turn it off you can see that it adds something over here now this annotation monitor well let me know or we’ll keep track of my different annotation scales it’ll do some of the things too we’ll talk about those later on but it’s another toggle switch to turn that off and on an annotation scaling has to do with text and dimensions specifically that means that if you have text that has an annotation setting to it it will automatically scale up or down depending on the scale of your drawing so if you put your regular text in and you have a scale of that drawing it let’s say a quarter inch to a foot and then you have another drawing of that same thing with that same text and it’s at one eighth of an inch to a foot well you would have to scale the text or put in multiple text objects unless you use the annotation text then you tell the annotation text through AutoCAD settings that hey I have text here and you know scale up or down the annotation to whatever scale it is just to fit and you define a paper size so that when you print it out it’s going to be you know three sixteenth of an inch high or whatever it is you want it to be so that’s a real nice feature now moving on here we can toggle right here between model and paper space paper space which we’ll talk about here real soon is where the magic happens model space is where your model is drawn your 3d object
and this tells you where you’re at when you’re in paper space you can work in model space and this is a quick toggle to get you in and out of there just in case you need to
you can always go back to model space by clicking on these tabs here model spaces where your line work goes paper space or in the layout is where your texts your title block notes etc things like that need to go
these next two options are the quick view layouts and the quick view drawings this gives you a quick thumbnail view of the layouts in your file your current file and it can allow you to quickly navigate to them
a quick view drawings shows you a list of all the files you have open and then you can quickly get to all of their tabs if you only have one file open it doesn’t really do you much good not only have to hear right now but as you can see as I highlight one or the other it shows me the different tabs that they have and I can get to them very quickly so those are some quick cool navigation tools that you can use
and you can use it to get back to where you want to go look at these a little bit more closely later on
next you have the scale of your drawing this is just the annotation or the visual scale for your drawing right now it’s currently set at 121 but I can set it at like a 12 40 and if I have different text or line work as you can see in here it will scale it up so that it visually appears at to be at a different scale doesn’t change the scale of your drawing it doesn’t enlarge or shrink your objects or anything just changes the visual scale for your file that you’re currently working in we’ll talk more about that later next buttons will control the visibility of that
and then your workspace switching your toolbar locking positions you can click this you can lock them all into place or you can you know let’s just let them go free let’s have free range toolbars here let them go where they want or need to and then you have hardware acceleration on or off and isolate objects will show and talk about isolating objects later but if I select and right-click
something for my default shortcut menu I can isolate these objects one or two different ways I can isolate just the object I’ve selected or I can hide the object I’ve selected and or I can turn all this off so let’s hide that circle it’s still there it’s not gone but you can see here now my light bulb is now red it’s saying hey guys something’s happened here there’s some stuff that’s hidden from view you may want to address that before you go too crazy and you’re drawing so if you end that and it comes back and it’s good again then over here this little button its application status bar I can turn these things on or off however I want set up some of my tray setting objects can display the notifications that are going to pop up when you do a print it’ll say hey your prints done so you can go over it if that’s annoying to you then you don’t have to turn it on and then here is your clean screen click that cleans up your screen gets rid of a lot of the
gobbledygook that’s on here that you may or may not need so that you can just draw in a larger area there are two ways to get that on and off you can just click the box again or press ctrl + 0 and that puts everything back
so the status bar as you can see is a big deal and a lot of times most of the things on here just there and you’re not even looking at them but it’s a quick look to tell you what’s on what’s off how to interact with AutoCAD turn things off and on and get a quick idea of what’s going on on certain aspects to your drawing so it visually informs you of these things which settings are on what settings are off and it gives you easy access and control to those settings and functions
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