From the course: AutoCAD 2020 Essential Training

Convert drawing units - AutoCAD Tutorial

From the course: AutoCAD 2020 Essential Training

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Convert drawing units

- [Narrator] In the previous video, we discussed how to manage our units by way of displaying the units, using the units command. What happens if you want to convert an existing drawing, that's using a particular unit of measurement to a different unit of measurement? We're going to look at that in the converting units dot DWG file, which you can download from the library, as usual, to follow along with the video. Now, this particular drawing is in imperial units. How do we know this? How can you check? Well, you can go down to the coordinate read out, on the status bar. That is reading in imperial units, feet and inches. I can also go to the home tab on the ribbon, go to the utilities panel, click on the flyout here, and use the distance command. And using my object snap, so I can click there, and click there using the endpoints snaps at each end. And it tells me that, that is four feet, and zero inches. I'll just exit the distance command there. Now, if I also type units, like we did in the previous video, and press enter. You can see the display of my length here, is architectural, and it is feet and inches. So, I'll just cancel that. So there's ways and means of sanity checking what units you are using in your AutoCad drawing. But you want to convert this. You want to make this bigger and millimeters because you need to convert it by a certain conversion factor. Now, that conversion factor, if you're going from imperial units, say inches, to your millimeters, is 25.4. Because there are 25.4 millimeters in an inch. So you need to make it 25.4 times bigger. So we're going to use the scale commands. So I select the rectangle, and all you've got to do now is right click, and scale is on the shortcut menu. So there's scale. And, you now need to select your base point. So there's your base point there. You can use the endpoint there, either one will work. The bottom left tends to be better, so I click there like so. Now, you need to put in the appropriate scale factor. It will prompt you for that, if you move the mouse a little bit. And, just put in 25.4. And press enter. You will now have a much, much bigger rectangle because it's 25.4 times bigger. So you might want to double click on the wheel to zoom extends, and then roll back on the wheel a couple of notches. Now, if we go back to that distance command, in the utilities panel, what you'll find is it looks a bit weird, the measurement. So, if I click there, it's now 107 feet and 7 1/4 inches. Now, that's not the right measurement. But, if I exit that, and I go to my units now and press enter. What I want to do now is change this to decimal, like so. And I'm going to leave it at say, two decimal places. You can choose whichever you want there, it's entirely up to you. And I'll okay that. And now, when I go back to the utilities panel, and go back to the distance command. You'll find that this measurement is very very different. Just make sure you get that end point snap to that end point snap there. And you can see its 1219.2. So what you've done there is you've converted that now, to millimeters. If you think about it, four feet roughly speaking, is three hundred millimeters. So four times three hundred is 1200. So, with the conversion factor, with the 25.4, what you've done now is you've converted that rectangle from feet and inches to millimeters, using a conversion factor. So it can be done. And there are other conversion factors you can consider. If you had a drawing in meters, If you wanted to convert that to millimeters, your conversion factor, your scale factor, will be a thousand. Because there's a thousand millimeters in a meter, and so on and so forth. One of the best sources of information for this is Google. Just go onto Google, and type in conversion factors for AutoCAD, and you will find that there's lots and lots of different websites that provide you with lists of all these conversion factors, from one unit to another. But that's how you convert your units in your AutoCAD drawings.

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