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

Chapter 6. AutoCAD Utilities

This chapter focuses on some of the utilities that AutoCAD offers to make you a more efficient drafter. Some of these utilities will help you precisely select what you want to modify or remove from a drawing. I also show you how to use the AutoCAD calculator for math calculations and unit conversions, and even to calculate points in a drawing.

Before you complete a design it's a good idea to clean up after yourself. You can use the PURGE command to remove named objects such as blocks and text styles from a drawing if they're not being used. This makes it easier to find the named objects you are using and can help to decrease the file size on disk for your drawing files. From time to time you might encounter a drawing that might not want to open or AutoCAD might crash because of a bad drawing from a contractor, a defect in the program, or even a Windows crash. In these cases, you may need to call upon a few utilities that allow you to recover and audit a drawing file that might contain errors.

Filtering Objects during Selection

In Chapter 2 of Book II, I talk about how to select objects by using single- and multiple-object selection methods. Those options are great when you know the exact location of the objects that you want to modify, but what if you want to select, for example, all the circle objects on a specific layer? You can zoom and pan around the drawing to select each one and then modify the objects, but that can take some time. AutoCAD provides ...