LT Unlimited

Windows Tip: Copy Path

Today’s tip comes to you courtesy of Robin Capper of RobiNZ CAD Blog. He’s been testing Windows 8 (which is NOT yet supported for AutoCAD, so please don’t try it), and came across this handy tip for Windows 7 users.

You probably know that even though the path bar in Windows Explorer usually looks like this:

You can click in it to get a path to copy, so it looks like this:

But what if you want the path you’re copying to include the file name, too? Turns out if you Shift+RightClick on the file name, there’s an option to “Copy as path.”

Click that, and you’ll get this: "C:\Users\morrick\Documents\Datasets\AutoCAD 2013\Dataset\Array_ElevatorCar.dwg"

Just remember that this isn’t in the regular right-click menu—you have to press Shift while you right-click. (I actually never knew there were different kinds of right-click menus in Windows, even though we have them in AutoCAD.)

Read the rest of Robin’s post for more information—thanks, Robin!

Application Menu Double-Click

Most of the features in the Application Menu are fairly obvious (those buttons are pretty big).

And most of you probably just click on the big red A to access this menu. (Some of you die-hard keyboard fans may prefer Alt+F.)

But have you ever double-clicked on that A? If you do, AutoCAD LT will close, but it will give you the option to save any drawings with unsaved changes along the way.

If you click “Cancel” here, you’ll stop the closing process. The only drawings that might be closed are any ones that didn’t have changes to save.

The reason that I’m posting about this is that it is a feature, not a bug. You’ll notice the same behavior in lots of other Windows programs, including the Office suite and even Windows Explorer—which doesn’t actually have a button in the upper left-hand corner. But double-clicking there closes the window anyway. (Bonus tip!)

Desktop Magnifying Glass

Today’s tip is more of a presentation trick than an AutoCAD one, but if some of you give lunch-and-learns or other demos, you may find it handy.

(Confession: I’m also writing this post because I turned this feature on during a live demo last week…and forgot how to turn it off. Maybe if I write it down, I’ll remember next time!)

At any rate, this handy built-in Windows feature is a magnifying glass. It enlarges a portion of your screen by 200-1600% – below is a sample of 200% magnification.

You can turn on this feature by pressing and the “plus” sign (+) simultaneously, or from the Control Panel.

At that point, the magnifying lens pops up, along with a toolbar.

It’s got buttons for zooming in and out; a “Views” menu where you can choose between Lens (which follows your cursor around), Full Screen (which magnifies the entire desktop), and Docked (which puts a static zoom window on the screen); and a Settings dialog.

It can be a little tricky to grab some of those buttons on the toolbar until you get used to the magnifier, so you can also use + “plus” and + “minus” to zoom in and out.

Also, if you don’t use the toolbar for a little bit, it gets hidden behind a magnifying glass:

Click on that to bring the toolbar back.

Now, what you really need to know is how to turn this thing OFF. During my presentation last week, I finally located the toolbar and got rid of it, but you can also just use + ESC.

Wish I’d remembered that then!

Location Aware Printing

When you run AutoCAD LT on a laptop, you can take your computer with you, but chances are you leave your printer behind. With Location Aware Printing, you can set a different default printer for every network you connect to. Then, when you change networks, Windows automatically sends documents to the correct printer.

To set this up, go to your “Devices and Printers” center and look for “Manage Default Printers.” Note that to get this started, you must have a default printer set already, and you have to select it in order to get the proper menu across the top of the Explorer window.

Once you’ve found it, the “Manage Default Printers” dialog provides you with a drop-down of networks and printers, and lets you mix-and-match.

For example, when I’m connected to my home network, I print to my HP, and when I’m not connected to anything, I print to PDF by default.

One drawback I have discovered is that it’s possible to be connected to more than one network at a time, in which case you might not get the default printer you expect. For example, I’m often connected wirelessly to my home network and by VPN to the Autodesk network. In that scenario, the Autodesk network wins, and I occasionally printed things in San Francisco when I meant to send them to my desktop printer here in DC. (Oops.) So I removed that default printer, but the other ones come in handy!

Resize Program Windows with Snap

Most of the the time, when you’re working in AutoCAD LT, you’ve got it maximized to completely fill up your screen. But what if you need to see two programs at once? Maybe you need to see a drawing and your e-mail, or a drawing and an Excel file, or a PowerPoint and an Excel file…you get the picture.

You’ve always been able to do this (more or less) by resizing windows and dragging them around your desktop, or with the “tile windows” option, but that’s imprecise at best.

In Windows 7, however, all you need to do to make a program window take up exactly half of your screen is to click-and-drag its titlebar over to the left or right side of your screen. When it gets close enough, a glassy outline appears showing you what will happen when you release the mouse button.

(Click the images for a larger view.)

Then you can do the same thing for a program on the other side of the desktop, and you have two perfectly sized windows to work with. This is most impressive on a wide-screen monitor (which mine is not), but you get the idea.

When you’re done, just click-and-drag the titlebar of a program to the top of your desktop to have it fill the entire screen again.

This only works with actual program instances, not with multiple open drawings in a single session of AutoCAD LT, but even so I find I use it all the time, especially for Word, Excel, Firefox, etc. It’s definitely one of my favorite quick-and-easy Windows 7 features.

<Update> With the assistance of my cat (who likes to "help" me type), I just discovered a keyboard shortcut for this: Windows key + Left/Right arrows will snap the active window to the left or right side, or un-snap it if it's already been snapped.

Windows Instant Search

One of the many featues I like about Windows 7 is Instant Search. You can find Search boxes in every instance of Windows Explorer and in the Start Menu.

 

The “instant” part happens when you start typing in one of those boxes. Enter just a few characters, and Windows starts pulling up relevant results. Keep typing, and it refines the results to match the new string. The next four images show the progression of the search results as I typed “tables” into the Windows Explorer search bar. (Click on any image to see it full size.)

     

The Start Menu search works in a similar way, except it pulls up programs as its first-priority results and files as the second.

It’s good enough that even if I know where a file or program is, sometimes I search for it instead of browsing!

Windows 7 Twitter Tip

I’ve got another Twitter Tip (a twip?) for you today, this time from @thecadgeek, a.k.a. Donnie Gladfelter:

Just discovered Middle-Clicking on an icon in the Windows 7 Taskbar opens another instance of it (great way to open multiple explorer win's)

This was a new one for me (I already told you about what happens when you right-click on a taskbar icon), so I’m happy to pass this tip on too.

Certified Graphics for AutoCAD LT

If you thought it doesn’t matter which video card you use with AutoCAD LT, it’s time to think again. Randall Young wrote today’s guest post to explain why.

Certified Graphics: Not just for AutoCAD anymore

Every year the development team at Autodesk tries to bring you the newest technology. This not only affects our hardware-acceleration-using AutoCAD users, but now also AutoCAD LT users. Since 2009, when the ribbon and the new layer manager were introduced, users have been using hardware acceleration without knowing it. This is because these features are developed on Microsoft’s .Net framework, which means “certified graphics are not just for AutoCAD anymore.”

When it comes to graphics cards, we have two levels of support: certified and tested. Certified graphics cards have a higher level of support and are considered in the “Workstation” class. If you find a defect while using certified graphics we will work with the vendor to get an expedited fix. Tested graphics cards do not have the same guarantee, but they are run though a similar qualification process. There is a considerable amount of testing that goes into stamping a driver as tested or certified. If you stick with these drivers, you will be running in an environment that is very similar to what AutoCAD developers are in. In doing this you are limiting the possibility of graphics-related crashes or artifacts.

To figure out what graphics card you have you:

1. Go to ‘My Computer,’ right click on it, and select ‘properties’ in the menu
2. (For XP) Go to the ‘Hardware’ tab and click the ‘Device Manager’ button
3. (For Vista and Windows 7) Click the ‘Device Manager’ button on the left of the dialog
4. Expand the node next to ‘Display Adapters’
5. Right click on the graphics card listed and select ‘properties’ in the menu
6. On the ‘Driver’ tab you can see the version and card information should look something like below.

Once you have this information, go to the AutoCAD Certified Graphics page (http://www.autodesk.com/autocad-graphicscard). To use this site, just chose your card from the card pull down (shown below in red). To download the latest drivers for your hardware click the little blue down arrow next to the operating system name. This will download and begin installing the best driver for AutoCAD and your system.

The certified hardware list is not only good to check for the latest driver for the hardware you have, but it is also a good resource to see what video card you should consider in your next desktop or laptop. We currently recertify every four to six months, so please stop back and check for the current driver. Thanks for reading this post, and good luck on your upcoming projects.

Randall Young
Software Quality Assurance Engineer
AutoCAD Test Development

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. :-)

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!