You might say that you can do that already by just selecting everything and changing the layer in the properties window to ByLayer. The SETBYLAYER Command.Īs you’d expect, this is used for setting properties to ByLayer (as they mostly should be).
#AUTOCAD COMMANDS FREE#
Please subscribe below, and feel free to forward on your tips!Īs of AutoCAD® 2008, we have a new command for dealing with the layering properties of objects en-masse. So in summary, use groups – don’t just always use blocks if you’re not actually repeatedly using them, because this will introduce unnecessary bloat into your drawings, and often groups are functionally more what we’re after anyway. With the option checked the entire group is selected, but with the option deselected only the individual entity is selected. Bear in mind that the selectable property controls what happens when you select one of the entities in a group. This will display the object grouping dialog box, which will allow you to manage and name your groups. To use groups, simply invoke the GROUP command, or you can select “Group” from the groups panel on the home tab. So, if a certain set of entities belong to more than one commonly selected group of entities, you can just create the two (or more) groups that contain the same set of entities (and whatever other entities are relevant to that group), and you’re now able to select the entire set by clicking on only one of the entities, as you would with a block. One of the main advantages of using a group instead of a block is that you are free to include the same entity in more than one group. However, groups actually work differently to blocks, and in many cases it is actually more useful to use a group instead of a block. If you found this tip useful please do consider subscribing below, and if you have a tip you’d like to share, let me know!īlocks are very useful, and you might be tempted to ignore the existence of groups and just always use blocks instead. I hope you find this tip as useful as I have in the past – I’ve lost count of the number of times that I’ve been caught out by an obscure system variable that I didn’t even know existed, which was for some reason changed in a drawing that I’d inherited from someone else ! This is a very quick way of identifying differences that may not be immediately obvious when skimming down. As shown above, we are just using a simple IF statement in excel to check the values of the cells, and if they’re not equal to each other then display the text “!! DIFFERENT !!”, otherwise display nothing. Now that you have the two (or more) columns side by side, you can enter a simple formula to compare the columns. You can simply repeat this export process for any other drawings you want to compare against, and just copy and paste the columns into the same spreadsheet like so: Although it’s not a native format to Excel, we can still open it using Excel and it will be opened with the data populated in the first column of the spreadsheet. The SVF file is simply a text file that contains the variable name followed by its value.
This option exports all system variables to a SVF file.
This is great functionality, but for the purposes of our comparison between drawings we are after the “Save All” option. This screen allows you to edit the values saved in system variables. Once you’ve started the command you’ll be presented with this: You can also access this command from the Express Tools ribbon tab, in the Tools section.
I’ve invented a neat way of tracking down the differences between two (or more) drawings, and it’s using an express tool called SYSVDLG.
#AUTOCAD COMMANDS HOW TO#
Identifying these variables and tracking down the root cause to our problems is fundamental to attaining a good grasp of AutoCAD®, so that we will know how to tackle similar problems in future. With this in mind, it can be very useful to try to reverse engineer the differences between two drawings, so that you can identify what the offending system variables might be. Things such as how drawing units are handled are controlled on a drawing by drawing basis, by saving system variables in the drawing. I’ve often been in a situation where a certain command or entity seems to behave differently in one drawing compared to another.