From the course: AutoCAD 2024 Essential Training

The application menu - AutoCAD Tutorial

From the course: AutoCAD 2024 Essential Training

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The application menu

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- We're starting a new chapter where we're going to dive deeper into the AutoCAD interface. And for that reason, we've got a drawing for you that you can download from the library. It's called interface.dwg, and you may recognize it from the introductory videos that you've just watched. It is the same drawing, the same floor plan, just save with a different file name just to allow you to have separate drawings for separate chapters. Now, like I said, in this chapter, we're going to dive deeper into the AutoCAD interface, and that's really important. You need to know what all these little bits do in the AutoCAD interface so that you can use AutoCAD effectively. So the first thing we're going to take a look at is the AutoCAD application menu. Now you'll find this top left of your AutoCAD application window. So right up here, it's the big red "A" in the corner. There's a little arrow there. If you click on the arrow there's the application menu right there. Now, it may look complex. It's not, trust me. All it is is a group of settings and a group of commands that you would use on a regular basis. And all Autodesk pieces of software have an application menu like this. So the first thing you'll notice is you've got a search bar at the top here, so you can go and search for file names that you might need to locate quickly and easily. Also here we have icons here where I can look at recent documents, or I can look at open documents. So at the moment, we've only got the interface.dwg open and that's our recent one. So if I go here, that's the documents I've opened recently. Now, if you're regularly using documents notice you can pin them. So if you've got drawings that you work on on a regular basis on a project, just pin them open. Now the other thing I can do here, I can have small icons, large icons. I can even go to images of the drawings if I want to like that. Personally, I prefer the small icons. It just works. And you can search by ordered list, access date, size, type, et cetera. I just use the ordered list most of the time. Now, over here on the left hand side, we've got lots of different commands, so I can open up a new drawing or start a sheet set. I can open up a drawing. I can also work from AutoCAD Web and Mobile. That's the web-based stuff that I talked about earlier. And we can work with sheet sets, DGNs and other sample files that you can download from the internet to have a play around with if you want to in AutoCAD later. Save and save as, they're pretty much what you expect. But save as, you can save out as lots of different file types. You've got the native DWG. You can save to web and mobile, in the cloud. You can save a template file, a drawing standards file and many other file formats. You can also convert your drawing format for selected drawing files to different DWG file formats as well. You can import files into AutoCAD, such as PDF and DGN. You can export out to different file formats as well, such as DWF, PDF, DGN, and other formats as well. You can publish and send even to a 3D print service, if you're 3D modeling. You can archive sheet sets you can etransmit, you can email drawings. You can share views via the Autodesk viewer in a browser. You can also share drawings using AutoCAD on the web through a browser as well. There's the usual print and plotting settings. Lots of different settings in there, and again we'll cover the majority of those during the course. We also have drawing utilities, which allow us to look at drawing properties, compare drawings, change our units, audit drawings, purge drawings and recover damaged files as well. And then last but not least, at the bottom here we can close the current drawing, or if we've got more than one drawing open, we can close all the drawings. You'll also notice down here we have options. If I click on options, you'll find that this opens the options dialogue box, which is all of your settings that AutoCAD uses on a day-to-day basis. Now, I'm not going to jump into all of these. We'll talk about this maybe a little later as well. But the whole idea of all of this is all of these are your preset settings that you use to run AutoCAD on a day-to-day basis. So, for example, we're in the open and save tab. This is all the settings for opening and saving files. You've got user preferences, where you can have standard windows behavior, change your insertion scale of objects, and so on. I'm not going to make any changes to the options. I'm just going to click on cancel. But you can get to the options dialogue box from the application menu. You can also just right click, bring up the shortcut menu and it's always down at the bottom of the default shortcut menu as well. There's options right there. I'll just hit escape to lose the shortcut menu. But that pretty much covers the application menu in AutoCAD. And as I said, all Autodesk products have that application menu, and it just covers all of the basic kind of requirements that you need to run the AutoCAD software.

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