From the course: AutoCAD 2018 Essential Training

Exploring the user interface - AutoCAD Tutorial

From the course: AutoCAD 2018 Essential Training

Start my 1-month free trial

Exploring the user interface

- [Voiceover] When you open up AutoCAD 2017 for the first time, the user interface can actually be quite daunting for the beginner. There's a lot of information there in front of you. What I want to do is just take you through some of the basic tools that are available to you and the features within the AutoCAD 2017 user interface. Now you'll notice at the top of the screen we've got another file open now, it's 01_Exploring.dwg. You'll find that in your Lynda.com exercise files that you've hopefully downloaded by now and have them stored on your computer somewhere. If you want to follow along with the videos, that's the file you will need to have open in AutoCAD 2017. We're going to use that file for all of the exercises in this section as well so you don't need to open up any other file. We'll only be using this particular file. So we're going to explore the user interface in this particular section. Let's take an overall view of the working screen in AutoCAD 2017. Now you'll notice at the top of the screen there's lots of icons and the title bar telling us the name of the DWG file. Underneath that we have tabs. They are known as things like Home, Insert, Annotate, Parametric, and each time you click on one of those tabs, it'll open up a different part of the ribbon. Underneath that, you then have what they call the Start tabs or Drawing tabs, and these tabs are very, very useful, and we'll go into all of this in a lot more detail. And then where you can see the actual drawing itself, that's known as the drawing area. And to the right of the drawing there, you can see your view cube with the north, south, east, and west on it. And there's a bar to the right just down the right-hand side of the drawing area, that's known as the navigation bar. Now all of these tools get used within AutoCAD itself, and I'll touch on all of them in this section as we go through the exercises. So I just want to show you some of the items that are more biased towards using the product rather than actually drawing within AutoCAD. Right at the beginning here, at the top left corner of the screen, we have the Application menu, like so. And you can see the Application menu, and what it does is it shows you basic commands within AutoCAD such as New, Open, Save, Save As, Import, Export, Publish, Print, Drawing Utilities, and obviously, Close. And what you've also got is a list of drawings that you've opened in the past as well. You can see a list of drawings that I've opened there as I've worked through various sections of perhaps another Lynda.com course. So that's the Application menu for you there in a nutshell. You can see that you can change the listings here. I can go to Open Documents, and I've got 01_Exploring open. Or I can go to Recent Documents. I can so search for commands in the help up here. So if I type in line, for example, that will take me to all of the mentions of line in all the help screens and so on. And then if I click away from that, and just remove this, like so, it then takes me back like that, and I just hit Escape there on the keyboard, and that loses the Application menu. Next to the Application menu here, we have the Quick Access toolbar. Now you can see here there's various commands that are on the Application menu such as New, Open, Save, Save As. You've also got a little Plot there. You've also got Undo and Redo, as you have in many other products as well. Now the other thing here is workspaces which we will be touching on. You can see and look at your relevant and most current Workspace there. You've then got the title bar showing us the name of the file. Over here to the right, we have the Info Center. So there's our help. We can Search for results in help. We sign into Autodesk A360. We've also got the Autodesk Exchange Apps store, and we've also got Stay Connected with the online community, and we've also got the help screens as well. So I can click there to access the help whenever I need to in AutoCAD 2017. So those are the sort of features that allow you to use the product rather than draft with the product. What we'll do as we work through this section, I'll show you things like how to use the ribbon, how to use the Start tab, how to use the view cube, and so on. So let's start working through these features of AutoCAD 2017 and see how we can explore the user interface, learn how to use it, and then use AutoCAD 2017 effectively.

Contents