AutoCAD® 2009 & AutoCAD LT® 2009 All-in-One Desk Reference for Dummies®

Chapter 5. Recording Your Actions

Already in this minibook, you've discovered how to customize AutoCAD through creating command aliases and desktop shortcuts, customizing the user interface with the Customize User Interface (CUI) Editor, writing scripts, and much more. Action macros are yet another form of customizing AutoCAD, and they're fairly easy to create when you understand the workflow. If you liked the idea of creating scripts to automate repetitive tasks in Chapter 4 of this minibook, you will no doubt feel that action macro files will be an even better choice for you. Instead of using a text editor to type the commands and command options you want to use as you do for a script file, you use AutoCAD to run through the series of commands that you want to be able to use over and over again. While doing so, AutoCAD uses its Action Recorder to take notes as to which commands and command options you're using and how you're providing input for the commands.

Note

Action Recorder is a new feature in AutoCAD 2009 that allows you to automate repetitive tasks. Like most of the different customization options available in AutoCAD, AutoCAD LT users can't use this feature. So if you're using AutoCAD LT 2009, you can read through the chapter to find out what you're missing out on, but there's nothing for you otherwise.

In this chapter, I take you through recording and managing action macro files, playing them back and eventually enhancing an action macro file so it requests user input during ...