AutoCAD® 2012 FOR DUMMIES®

AutoCAD Does Windows (And Office)

Whether you're a total newcomer or an experienced user from a few releases back, I can guarantee that finding your way around AutoCAD 2012 is going to be a challenging experience.

If you're already familiar with the Microsoft Office 2007 suite, you may recognize some program features, such as the Ribbon and the Application Menu, which you use for choosing commands or changing system settings. But even if AutoCAD's new look does seem a little familiar in places, many aspects of the program's appearance — and some of the ways in which you work with it — are quite different from other Windows programs. Depending on the workspace you've chosen to use, you can, in many cases, tell the program what to do in at least five ways — pick a toolbar button, pick from a pull-down menu, pick a tool button from a Ribbon panel, type at the keyboard, or choose from a right-click menu — none of which is necessarily the best method to use for every task.

Profiling your display

The illustrations and descriptions in this chapter and throughout the book show the default configuration of the AutoCAD 2012 Drafting & Annotation workspace — that is, the way the screen looks if you use the standard version of AutoCAD 2012 (not a flavored version, such as AutoCAD Architecture 2012 or AutoCAD Mechanical 2012) and don't change any display settings. You can change workspaces ...