From the course: AutoCAD 2018 Essential Training

Using Zoom commands - AutoCAD Tutorial

From the course: AutoCAD 2018 Essential Training

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Using Zoom commands

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- [Voiceover] There are many different ways of navigating your drawings in AutoCAD and what we're going to start looking at in this section is how we navigate the drawings and utilize the tools to get around our drawings quickly and effectively. So, you'll see at the top of the screen there we're in 03 NavigatingDrawings.dwg. This is in your lynda.com exercise files, so download it accordingly and you can use it to follow along with the videos. Now, you'll notice I'm zoomed in really close to a detail of some stairs on one particular part of the drawing. And you can see the concrete columns here. There's a column there, and there's also a column there as well. And you can see the walls and some of the grid lines here as well, like so. Now, what we're going to do is utilize the zoom commands only. Now, I want to utilize zoom really quickly. How can I do that without using the view cube or the navigation bar over on the right hand side? We have mentioned those previously. There's a really neat tool available to you. You can go down to the command line, like this, and type 'zoom' like that and you'll see when I press 'enter' after zoom I've got all the different zoom tools available to me there on the command line. Now, I might not want all of those different types of zoom commands. I can zoom all, I can zoom center, I can zoom dynamic, I can zoom extents, I can zoom previous, zoom scale, zoom window, or zoom object, or I can zoom in real time. Can you see in the brackets there 'real time'? If I press enter, that will allow me to zoom in real time. So, if I go 'enter' like that, and then 'enter' I can zoom in real time. Now, I can move over like this. Now, the real time zoom is the one that I want. And you can see there, look. As I come away from the command line, I'm in real time zoom. I'm just going to hit 'escape' there, and come out of the command, because there's a much quicker way of getting there than having to go via the command line. Just right click in the drawing area on the mouse. Select 'zoom' on the default short cut menu, and you're in the default zoom commands. If I hold down the left hand mouse button, as you can see, if I drag up and down I can zoom in and out. But I can only zoom to that point at the top of the screen there, and that point at the bottom of the screen. Once I go past, I have to release the mouse button and then hold down the mouse button again to zoom again. And you can see, as I keep dragging down, so I drag down, release the mouse button, move the magnifying glass up, click and drag down again, I'm gradually zooming out on our nice little college stroke hotel building. Now, I'm still in zoom. You can see the magnifying glass there as I move around. If I right click, I can also zoom window, so if I select 'zoom window' now and click and drag a window like that. See the blue window there? Release. It zooms me in to the extents of the window. If I right click again and go zoom original, it will zoom to the original view that I had when I was zoomed in really close at the beginning. And last but not least, if I right click again, I've also got 'zoom extents', which will take me to the visible extents of the objects on the drawing. If I right click again though, and go back to zoom original, you can see I go back to that original view that I had when I first opened up the drawing. Now, it's a good CAD practice to get into to always right click there and zoom extents on any drawing before you save it, and then right click again to do the exit, like so, to come out of the zoom tool. And you can see now that I can see the whole drawing and the good thing is any thumbnails of that drawing people will be able to see the whole drawing rather than just that top part of the stairs that I was originally zoomed into. So those are your zoom tools available to you in AutoCAD 2017.

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