Autodesk AutoCAD 2010: Advanced Concepts Course

Welcome to the AutoCAD 2010 Advanced Concepts Course. What we're going to look at here is what's new in AutoCAD 2010 first of all just to get you familiar with some of the new features and tools that are available. So the first thing we need to look at is at the top of the screen when you first startup AutoCAD 2010. You have the Ribbon. Now, for those of you that have not used AutoCAD 2009 or AutoCAD 2010 yet, you can see there that the Ribbon is a very different user interface. You now have a Ribbon with panels as you can see. There's the Draw Panel, the Modify Panel, the Layers Panel and so on. You also have Tabs. So there's the Home Tab, there's the Insert Tab here at the top, the Annotate Tab. As you can see, the commands are the same; they're just in different places. Let's go back now to the Home Tab. Now, what we're going to look at here as well is some of the new features that are available in AutoCAD 2010. For those of you that have used AutoCAD 2009, you'll be familiar with this big red A in the top, left corner of the screen. In AutoCAD 2009 that was known as the Menu Browser and it replicated the menu pull-downs from older versions of AutoCAD. In AutoCAD 2010 it's known as the Application Menu. When you click on the fly-out arrow there, you'll see that it looks very different from AutoCAD 2009 or if you've not seen it before, it looks very different all the same. As you can see there, if you hover over a topic here in the left-hand panel, you can see New, Open, Save, Save As. I can Save as a Template File for example or a Standard File or just as a Drawing. If I go up to the top here, I can look at Recent Documents, which is the current list. I can also click here, Open Documents and you can see that I've got Drawing 1 open. That's at the top of the screen here in the Title Bar. Let's go back there to the Recent Documents Button. So as you can see, lots of different settings available and commands available in the Application Menu. I'm just going to hit Escape to come out of that and what we'll look at now is the Ribbon again. Just above the Ribbon we've got the Quick Access Toolbar. This is part of the Ribbon and as you can see there, there are regularly-used commands for things like Undo, Save, Plot. You can also click on here and you can customize your Quick Access Toolbar if you wish. I'm not going to do that right now. Let's have a look now at some of the new tabs available in AutoCAD 2010. We have here the Parametric Tab. AutoCAD 2010 offers us Parametric Constraints now so if we look at Geometric here or Dimensional, these are constraints based on things like parallel or perpendicular. The Dimensional Constraints are based on distances. You can convert dimensions into dimensional constraints for example. Let's have a look at that now. I've got a horizontal line here and an angled line here. I want to make the angled line here always parallel with the horizontal line. So I'm going to use the Geometric Constraint here in the Geometric Panel and it's this one here; Parallel. I'm going to use the Parallel Geometric Constraint. So I click on it. When I come into the drawing area, can you see the two parallel lines there in a pale blue? They're telling me that I'm using the Parallel Constraint. So I select the first object that I'm going to make parallel to and then the second object is the object I'm going to make parallel. Now, if I click at the left-hand end here of the angled line, it will pivot about the left-hand end of the line. If I click on the line down here near the right-hand end, it will pivot about the right-hand end of the line. So if I click up here, watch what happens to the line now. You'll see that it pivots about this point here and makes this line here parallel with this line here. Notice as I hover over them now there's a little blue Constraint Symbol there by the crosshair but also the specific constraint highlights. There's the Parallel Constraints. Now, another tab that I really like is the Express Tools Tab. Express Tools are commands, macros, things that have been written by users and organizations that use AutoCAD. They've been around for some time and one of my favorites is this one; Arch Aligned on the Text Panel here on the Ribbon in the Express Tools Tab. So let's click on Arc Aligned Text here, come into the drawing. I'm going to pick this arc here and as you can see now, the Arc Aligned Text Workshop appears. So it's prompting me there for the text I want to align with my arc so I'm going to put in this is arc aligned text like so. Text Height is 10. That's 10 millimeters because this is a metric millimeters drawing and the offset from the arc there is four millimeters. I've selected a font there of Verdana. If I click on OK now it aligns the text there around the arc. Now, you'll notice there, that text as you can see, because of the size of the text, it's overwriting itself. The good thing is I can go to Arc Aligned here again, select the text and I can update it. So let's change that text height there to say six. If I OK that now, you'll see the text height is smaller and it now looks much better. So as you can see, lots of nice, new tools in AutoCAD 2010 to make you more productive and more efficient in your drawing duties.  

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