No-longer-Express Tools: Overkill & NCOPY

Two more features formerly part of the Express Tools add-on are now full-blown commands in both AutoCAD and AutoCAD LT 2012. They were actually re-written from the ground up, so they’re fully integrated into the program this year. You’ll find both of them on the expanded portion of the Modify panel on the Home tab.

The first is Nested Copy, or NCOPY. With it, you can copy objects out of an  external reference or block directly into the host file. It basically saves you a few steps over previous processes, where you might use REFEDIT or just open the file to get what you need.

You may also notice that NCOPY has the new Array option, just like the regular Copy command.

The other new tool is Delete Duplicate Objects, popularly known as OVERKILL. This one especially has had its performance improved, so if you’ve used it before in a previous version of AutoCAD you should notice a real difference.

Overkill is a drawing-cleanup tool. It removes redundant copies of objects that are exactly on top of each other, eliminates extra vertices in polylines, and combines overlapping co-linear objects.

You can specify a tolerance, to say how close two objects have to be before they’re considered to be overlapping. You can also choose which properties to consider when determining identical-ness. By default, two objects that are different colors would be considered to be the same (and one of them would be removed), but two otherwise-identical lines that are on two different layers would not be the same (they both would stay).

If you’ve ever gotten a drawing that made you ask, “What did they do, copy and paste this thing in the same place fifteen times? And where on earth did all these extra polyline grips come from?” you’ll be glad to see Overkill in your AutoCAD LT.

Comments

[Quinn]

NCOPY is not a command, is half of command because it doesn't working on Layout.