From the course: AutoCAD 2020 Essential Training

Edit dimensions and dimension overrides - AutoCAD Tutorial

From the course: AutoCAD 2020 Essential Training

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Edit dimensions and dimension overrides

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- [Narrator] We're starting a new chapter now in our AutoCAD essentials course, and we're going to be looking at more dimensioning techniques, where we can look at more dimensioning, but also more importantly how we edit dimensions effectively and tweak them in our drawings to suit our requirements. We've got a new drawing for you. It's called MoreDimensioning.dwg. You can download that from the library, as usual, to follow along with all of the videos in this particular chapter. Once you've got the drawing loaded up, we're going to zoom in on the top left quadrant of the drawing, and you'll notice this time we've got grid lines and we've got various lines that we can dimension to and from. We're going to place a simple linear dimension from the end of this orange line to the end of this orange line here, first of all. Make sure you're on the dimensioning layer, which is A010-D_DIM. You can see that in the Letters panel there, that's the layer that we need right there. Also make sure, in the Annotation flyout, that you are using the Training dimension style. If it's not there, select Training like so. Then we're going to place a linear dimension. So again we go to the Annotation panel here, click on the flyout and select Linear, and we're going to go from this endpoint snap, left-click, to this endpoint snap here, left-click, and just move up a little bit and click again to place the dimension. Now the dimension looks really big, and that's because the annotation scale down here should be 1:100. If your dimensions come out really small, change the annotation scale to 1:100 and re-place the dimension like so. So we're going to look at editing a dimension, first of all, there's a really lovely command for this, it's called DDEDIT. So you literally type DD and then EDIT, like so, and you'll see it come up on the suggestion menu, DDEDIT (TEXTEDIT). It allows you to edit any piece of text annotation. It's a really clever command. So if I click here, like so, it prompts you to select an annotation object. So you go and select your 3048 dimension. As soon as you do that, everything kicks in. Your text editor up on the ribbon, your little cursor there, and so on. So what we can do is we can come over here now using the cursor keys. If I go to the end of the 3048, put a space in and put overall, so that is our 3048 overall dimension. I could then close the text editor on the ribbon by clicking on the green check, and that has updated our dimension. It's edited it quickly and easily. You then just press Enter to close out the command. Now that's great, and you can see that we've done what is in essence a text override in that dimension. You can also do overrides in a quicker, slightly different workflow as well. You can select the dimension, right-click, and go to Properties on the Shortcut menu, and then you get your Properties palette. Now, if you just slide down the Properties palette to the text area here, I'm going to just move this over so that you can see the dimension. You can see there that we've got text override, bracket, bracket, overall. Now, the two little brackets represent the dimension 3048, and there's our text override overall. So I can override that, deleting the overall text and leaving just the brackets. If I press Enter, watch the dimension on the screen. It updates back to just the dimension value. So those two little brackets there must be in place in a text override if you want the dimension value to appear in the dimension. So then we just close the Properties palette, hit Escape to deselect, and you've now edited and overridden your dimension in your AutoCAD drawing.

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