Autodesk has released the latest version of its flagship design program AutoCAD 2014 it’s the 28th release of AutoCAD and it’s noted as being version 19 point 1 so it continues with the AutoCAD 2013 dot DWG file type and format and it’s also supported on Windows XP Windows 7 and Windows 8 operating systems there’s no official support from Autodesk on Windows Vista there have been a few minor tweaks to the user interface in this version of AutoCAD one is the adoption of a brand new logo and
branding from Autodesk some of the icons and things will look a little bit differently in Windows Explorer and in the application menu you will now see this triangle cone red shape for the letter A besides the different look to it the functionality of everything else is the same but that’s the logo another addition is the file taps file tabs are a carryover from a third-party app that they’ve been making available for us but now file tabs are native to AutoCAD they’re part of it I have three files open right now drawing number two which has nothing in it ice rink example file which has a couple of tabs and the cottage plan and elevation drawings as you can see when you hover over the file tabs you get a preview of the different model space and paper space tabs that they have in them these are all blank in this file on the ice rink file as a model space
and when you hover over these other tabs it gives you a preview of what it’s going to look like in your drawing area and that’s a nice little thing and if that’s what you want just click on it and that file is activated now every file you have open will be listed up here when you make changes to your drawings it will put a little asterisk up there
that will tell you hey you’ve made changes but you haven’t saved them yet so when I hit ctrl s to save that’ll go away if you open up an AutoCAD file as read-only there will be a little lock icon in the file tab so if you want to close a file just click on the X that’ll close the file if you want to make a new file you can click on this plus sign and open up your template file click open and it creates a new drawing you can always rearrange these tabs just left-click and hold and then drag it put them in whatever order you want
otherwise it puts the file tabs in order that they were created or opened
whatever the case might be if you right-click on any of the tabs or in this open space here where the tabs would go you get options new file open a file save all that’ll save all of your open files or close all now if you right-click on the tab specifically you get a few more different options save as save all the regular save and then close close all and close all except this tab in this file since it’s one that’s been saved I can copy the full file path or I can open the file location this copies the file path so that I can paste it into an email into a notes into text and wherever I want and that’s a really nice feature this is the open file location’
these two items alone make file tabs fantastic now if you don’t want to use them at all that’s fine you don’t have to if you go to your View tab on the ribbon and go to file tabs
that’ll toggle them off and on for most of the video series though I’m going to have them turned off just to save some space another cool thing that they’ve added to AutoCAD 2014 are a lot of command line features right now I have dynamic input turned on and you’re going to see some of these features so if I start to type in a line command you’ll see dynamic input start to populate a list that’s with the autocomplete but if I turn off the dynamic input we’re really gonna see a lot of the features added into it here now when I type in the line command it populates a list of the different commands that start with the letters L and I because that’s all that I’ve typed in I can come in here and I can click either these and we’ll start that command one of the cool things about AutoCAD 2014 is that it remembers the commands you use it keeps track so if you use the line command often it will know that and so as you type in Li the line command eventually will be on top of this list instead of the list command or line type that’s really nice some of the other features right here in the command line the to go right in to help about that command so if I click on this question mark it’ll open up help and it will be about the line command if I don’t want to use help I can click on this little world thing and it will search on the internet for me for the line command about AutoCAD now not only do you get commands you also get systems variables so if I click on this little plus sign it’ll open up the system variables that start with the letter L and I and that’s really nice so you can get into some of these if you’re not sure what they are again you can click right on the help or if you have blocks inside your file or hatch patterns something like that it will search for it since we have a hatch pattern in the file that has the letters L and I right into it it will show that to you and where this is really nice is if you have a block inside your file so if I go to like the ice rink example file and I start typing in something just the letter L and I go to the blocks you see all these blocks and layers and hatch patterns that have the letter L in it
this block is the door it’s left hung 36 inches so I can type in the word door and it will find the block for me I can click it and it will insert the block just like you normally would but you don’t have to start the insert command you can just type it in you can even use that just to see if your drawing has the block in it or not now the command line has a few other options to it alternate strings of text that you can type in place of a command so if you type in the word
pre-programmed into AutoCAD for you and you can just start typing things in and you’ll see what they’re going to do so this list can be edited using the edit aliases tool in the manage tab in the ribbon so you can go to that and set those up if you right-click in your command line you’ll get to a lot of your options your recent commands input settings where you can turn these features off and on and go to your different histories the transparencies and just get to regular options from AutoCAD
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