LT Unlimited

On vacation

Autodesk is off this week, so the blog is too. (Even electrons deserve a break sometimes.) And since next Monday is the July 4th holiday (yes, I know Monday is actually the 5th), look for the tips & tricks to resume on Wednesday.

Hope all my US readers have a happy holiday weekend!

AUGI Salary Survey now live!

Today’s post is brought to you by the AUGI Salary Survey.

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Dear AUGI Member,

How does your salary stack up against others with your title, in your industry, and in your geographic region? AUGI promises to help you find that out. But first you have to complete the 2010 AUGI Salary Survey!

Key results will be published in AUGIWorld magazine this fall, and we'll present our usual in-depth analyses for additional industries on www.AUGI.com.

The AUGI Salary Survey is always a work in progress. The comments and feedback we've collected from AUGI members are reviewed and used to enhance this year's survey to include more job titles, additional questions, and other improvements. You'll get results that you can show to the boss, and maybe even take to the bank. Click here to take the Salary Survey.

As always, your participation in AUGI's Salary Survey is anonymous. We do not track, capture, or in any way link individual AUGI members with the survey data they provide.

Remember that your participation is vital. The more survey respondents there are, the more accurate our picture of salaries earned and benefits enjoyed by all AUGI members worldwide. Please don’t delay! The deadline for participating in the survey is July 10, 2010.

Thanks,
Melanie Perry
AUGI Salary Survey Manager

Windows 7 Backup and Restore

I’m writing this post from my brand-new computer. It’s an HP EliteBook 8540w, and as far as I can tell it’s great. I haven’t had much of a chance to put it through its paces yet, but so far it seems like a nice machine. (64-bit quad-core, 8GB RAM…computers have come a long way, haven’t they? I remember being proud of 128 MB RAM…)

Switching computers can be a very painful process, but I wanted to post about something in Windows 7 that made it a little bit easier: Backup and Restore.

The Windows 7 Backup feature copies all your important files to a external drive – a CD/DVD, external hard drive, or a network location (for Windows Professional & Ultimate). You can either pick files and folders yourself, or let Windows choose. I used an external hard drive, and let Windows select the files.

The initial backup took about an hour and a half (not bad for 22GB worth of stuff), but when I refreshed it, it only took about 10 minutes.

Once the backup was done, I hooked up the external hard drive to the new computer and used the Restore function to pull all the data over. When it was finished (in maybe 15 minutes, I wasn’t really watching), my desktop and all my Libraries were just as they had been on the old machine.

It wasn’t perfect (it seems that even the best automation rarely is). I had to set up a few things in Outlook, and re-adjust some system settings, but I don’t think I’ve ever had an easier transfer.

Sadly, Backup and Restore can’t re-install all my programs for me…I’m off to finish that up now. :-)

Set Default List of Annotation Scales

Annotation Scaling – the ability to set the size of text, dimensions, blocks, and hatches based on the drawing scale – has been around since AutoCAD LT 2008.

It’s much too big a topic to cover in a single blog post – for a good run-down see these three classes from AU. (Although if there’s demand, I may consider a blog series.)

But I did want to point out a new feature that was added to Annotation Scaling in AutoCAD LT 2011: Default Scale Lists.

Since Annotation Scaling was introduced, you’ve always been able to add and remove scales from individual drawings with the Scale List dialog.

What’s changed is the behavior of the “Reset” button in the bottom left.

Before now, it simply restored the standard list of scales included with AutoCAD LT – which probably had more scales than you actually use, especially since it includes both imperial and metric scales.

In 2011, though, you can define your own default lists of scales – metric and imperial – from the User Preferences tab in the Options dialog.

Here, you can add, edit, and remove scales until you have only the ones you need. You can even change the order in which they appear. (In this dialog, “Reset” restores the original lists that are installed with the program.)

Once you have your lists defined, the Reset button in the Edit Drawing Scales dialog restores either or both of your default scale lists.

We know that drawings with lots of annotation scales can get cluttered (there’s even a Scale List Cleanup for AutoCAD LT 2009 and 2008), so this is just one more way to help you manage your scales.

New AutoCAD Books Available

You can never get too much AutoCAD information, right? And while the internet is a great place to get a lot of that info, sometimes you just want to read a book.

Two new publications are now available to help you get your AutoCAD fix. They’re not LT-specific, but there’s still a lot of overlap.

Michael Beall, the AutoCAD Trainer Guy, has just released “The AutoCAD Workbench,” a compilation of the 7 years’ worth of (fantastic) monthly articles he’s written for "Michael’s Corner” over at CADTutor.net.

Although the content for the book was originally developed for versions as far back as AutoCAD 2004, all the exercises, instructions, and screenshots have been updated for AutoCAD 2011.

You can order this book directly from Michael’s site.

(It’s hard to believe how much is still relevant after 7 years…with all the new good stuff we add, the old stuff is still good too.)

Donnie Gladfelter, the CAD Geek, has taken over the “No Experience Required” series for the 2011 installment.

According to the Amazon blurb, the book “helps you quickly see results as you proceed through an engaging, hands-on tutorial. Learn how to plan, develop, document, and present a complete AutoCAD project by following each step sequentially, or, if you prefer, jump in at any stage by downloading the drawing files from the book's companion website. You'll master all essential AutoCAD features, get a thorough grounding in the basics, learn the very latest industry standards and techniques, and quickly become productive with AutoCAD 2011.”

The official release date is sometime next week, but you can pre-order it now to be the first on your block (or in your cube farm) to have it.

Enjoy!

Drag Files from Jump Lists

I’ve posted about jump lists twice before, but I keep finding out new fun facts about them.

For instance, did you know that you can drag-and-drop files from jump lists directly into e-mail messages as attachments?

 

Any time you don’t have to browse for a file, that’s at least 30 seconds you get back in your day. That may not seem like a lot, but trust me, it adds up fast.

P.S. Have you taken the Object Enablers Survey yet? Yes? Thanks! No? Why not? It's short!

Custom Right-Click Shortcut Menus

Every chance I get these days, I find myself talking about the benefit of right-click shortcut menus. (When in doubt, right-click!) Even better, most people these days agree with me – almost nobody has them turned off anymore.

But even if you’re already a convert, you can add power to your right-click menus with a little customization.

Let’s take a look at the menu that appears when you’ve got a generic object selected – line, arc, circle, etc.

   

In the middle, there’s a section with a bunch of editing commands: Erase, Mirro, Copy, Scale, Rotate, and Draw Order. But if you compare it to the Modify panel of the ribbon, there’s a big omission: Mirror.

Let’s fix that.

Shortcut menus are stored where most other UI elements are, in the CUI.

There are a ton of them in here, and it’s not always obvious which one you want.

(These are just the defaults, too – you can always make more.)

In this case, since we want to add Mirror to the existing command group, we can just expand the menus until we find the one we need.

It happens to be the Edit Menu.

To add Mirror to this group, it’s as easy as searching for it in the Command pane and dragging-and-dropping it into place.

When you’re done, and press OK to save your changes and exit the CUI editor, you can see that Mirror has now taken its place in the right-click shortcut menu.

P.S. Don’t forget to take the Object Enablers Survey. It’s super-short, and every response counts!

Object Enabler Survey – Your Input Needed!

The AutoCAD LT team would like your input on Object Enablers. (These are the plug-ins that help display smart objects from software like AutoCAD Architecture and AutoCAD Civil in other programs.)

Here’s the survey link: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/P3RL6V3

It’s all of 7 questions, and shouldn’t take more than 5 minutes.

Thanks in advance for your time!

AutoCAD at the AIA Convention

If any of you will be at the AIA Convention in Miami this week, be sure to stop by Guillermo Melantoni’s presentations on the Main Stage and Mini Theater. Guillermo is one of our 3D design & modeling wizards and the author of the What a Mesh blog.

He’ll be presenting on Friday, June 11, in the Main Theater, 4:00-4.30 pm on AutoCAD & Revit interoperability, and on Thursday, June 10, in the Mini Theater with (4) 30-minute presentations at 11:00, noon, 2:00, and 3:00.

New Look for Autodesk Discussion Forums

The Autodesk Discussion Forums just finished a makeover & update – check out the new look at www.autodesk.com/discussion.

Among the new features are easier identification of employee posts; an improved profile with signatures, preferences, and subscription options; the ability to mark threads as answered; embedding of images in posts, and more.

Read the Update FAQ here.

Unfortunately, along with this update comes the discontinuation of newsreader (NNTP) support. This was not an easy decision for our web team, but one that needed to happen. Read about the decision and its implications here.

I hope you give the new format a chance – there’s a feedback forum where you can share your thoughts with the Discussion Forum team.

See you in the forums!