From the course: AutoCAD 2021 Essential Training

Editing dimensions and dimension overrides - AutoCAD Tutorial

From the course: AutoCAD 2021 Essential Training

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Editing dimensions and dimension overrides

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- [Instructor] We're starting a new chapter now, where we're going to be looking at more dimensioning techniques in your AutoCAD drawings. So we've got a new drawing for you. It's called moredimensioning.dwg. And you can download it from the library as usual. You should know the drill by now. You download the drawing from the library to follow along with the videos. Now, the more dimensioning.dwg file has a few new bits and pieces there for you. We have some center lines, some grid lines, some grid bubbles showing the layout primarily of the columns in the floor plan. And what we're going to do is we're going to work with dimensions and some of the dimensioning techniques available to you. So make sure you're in the home tab on the ribbon, and in the layers panel, make sure you're using this layer, the A010-d_dimlayer, that one there. It's like a pink sort of purple-y color. And then we're going to zoom in on this top left quadrant of the drawing. Now as you zoom in, you'll be able to see the dashes and the dots and things of the center lines and the grid lines and so on. And what we're going to do, we're going to place a single linear dimension just here from the end of this line to the end of this line here. So, we can do that from the home tab on the ribbon, but before we do that, go to your annotation file on your annotation panel and make sure that you're using the training dimension style there. So you want the training dimension style, that one. And then all we do is place a linear dimension. Again, you can do that in the home tab on the ribbon in the annotation panel. There's the flyout there, linear, like so. Utilizing your object snap, you're going to go from endpoint to endpoint here. Try and get the endpoint snap like that, and then just drag the dimension up a little bit. It should be 3048 and then left click like so. Now, what we're going to have a look at is, obviously, placing a dimension, which we've already done, and if you've already done the Learning AutoCAD course, as well, you'll know about dimensioning as well. Now, dimensioning is very simple. You pick the origin point and then place the dimension, regardless of what dimension type you're using. So, we've now got our 3048 dimension there. Now it may be that we want to change that dimension or add some text to that dimension. There's a great command in AutoCAD called DDEDIT. So if I type DDEDIT, you'll notice when I type it it also says in brackets, text edit. If you type DDEDIT, you can edit any type of annotation. It doesn't have to be a dimension. It could be text, multi-line text, single line text, and so on. Now, I'm going to type DDEDIT like that and press enter, and then it says select an annotation object. So I select the text in the dimension, like so. Now, you'll notice, you have a little flashing cursor there just in front of the three. We want to go to the other side, toward the eight, so just use your arrow keys. And can you see the cursor is now flashing to the right-hand side of the eight? And then I'm going to put a space, and then type, overall. Like that. And then simply, I can close the text editor up here, or I can click away from the text. You'll notice it goes into the multi-line text editor when you do this. So any dimension text that you edit has the advantage of using all this formatting available to you with multi-line text. I'm going to click on close text editor, and you can see that now says 3048 overall. It's also prompting me for another annotation object. I don't need one, so just press enter to cancel the command. Now, here's the lovely thing about AutoCAD. There's always two or three different ways to do things. So, I'm going to edit that dimension now by selecting it and then just right-clicking somewhere in the screen to bring up the shortcut menu, and I'm going to bring up the properties palette. Now, unfortunately my properties palette is now covering the dimensions so I'll just drag it over here a little. And we can now see all the properties of what they call a rotated dimension. If we come down the slider bar in the properties palette, you will see that there is a great big area all about text in that dimension. Now, the only bit we need to worry about is this bit at the bottom. Now, you can see the measurement is 3048. That's the actual, physical distance. You can't change that; it's grayed out. But you'll notice you've got these two little greater than, less than arrows, and they are just text, but they represent the 3048. So if you look at the dimension, we've got 3048, those two little sort of arrows represent the number, the measurement, and then we've got the space, and then overall. So if I click in this box here and remove the overall and the space, and then all I've got to do is press enter, you'll see that we got back to our 3048 in our dimension. So you can add a text override in the properties palette or you can use your DDEDIT command. I'll just close the properties palette now, hit escape a couple times, and we're back to the original dimension that we placed in the drawing.

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