The application menu - AutoCAD Tutorial

- [Instructor] We're starting a new chapter now in our course and we've got a new drawing for you to use that you can download from the library. It's called interface.dwg. You can see the name of the file at the top of the screen. And in this chapter, we're going to be looking at some of the interface tools in AutoCAD that you can utilize and use AutoCAD effectively with. Now, the first one of these that we're going to look at is going to be the application menu. Now, just before we do that, you can see that we are in a drawing, our interface.dwg file. It's a floor plan of a building and we are in the model tab, bottom left here, model tab. Okay, so just make sure that you're in the same space in AutoCAD that I'm in as we go through the videos in this chapter. Now the application menu is top left of your AutoCAD screen. It's just up here. You can see the little flyer arrow next to the big red A. Click on it and there's the application menu. Now there's lots of things in the application menu that are very useful. The search bar for example. If I type line in there, you'll see as soon as I start typing line, it gives me all these different tools that are available for the word line, such as the line command or it's on the ribbon tab on the home tab there, on the ribbon tab annotate as well, all these different incidences of the word "line" or the letters line, L-I-N-E. If I backspace that, as you can see, I go back to the application menu. Now over here, you can see that I've got various buttons, recent documents or I can have open documents. There's my interface.dwg file. And there's a little preview with the location of it as well. If I go back there, there's the recent document so I've had various drawings open. I can do that by way of an audit list by access date, size type, et cetera. And if I click away, you can see the application menu disappears. Simply click on it again and there we are, there's the list again. If I come here, I can do small icons, large icons. I can also have small images or even larger images if I want to. I normally just go for the small icons. And if you're using drawings regularly, let's say my interface.dwg file, I can pin it so it always stays in the list. As this list gets bigger, obviously it refreshes to a certain number of drawings in the list. So bear that in mind 'cause you could lose one that you might use regularly. I'll just dump in that again like so. On the left-hand side of the application menu, you've got new drawing or sheet set. Open a drawing, open a drawing from AutoCAD web and mobile. We'll talk about that later. I can open sheet sets. I can save, you'll notice as well, that is literally save, Control + S on the keyboard. I can save as a drawing. I can save to web and mobile. I can create a drawing template, a drawing standards template. I can go to other formats and I can also use DWG convert there to convert the format version of selected drawing files. So this particular file is in AutoCAD 2013 DWG format. I could convert that to a different DWG format if I wanted to. You can also import various types of files, PDFs, DGNs, and other formats there. And if I go to other formats, I'll then get what is called a dialog box, as you can see. And I just want to show you here all the different types of files that you can bring into AutoCAD like so. I'll just hit escape a couple of times to lose that and go back to the application menu. I can also export out to different file type you'll notice there. I can publish my sheets and my model tab and so on. I can even send to a 3D print service if I'm working in 3D. But there's other tools there that are very useful such as E transmit, where you can package up your drawing files and send them to somebody via email. There's also a new feature in AutoCAD 2022, share drawing. You can share a link to the current version of the drawing including its external references, and somebody can link to the drawing and look and see what is the content of the drawing. I can also print. I've got all my printer settings here, 3D printing. I can preview, I can batch plot, I can plot and so on. So then, I can batch plot with all the different files and sheets that I've got available. So there's the model tab down there and there's the two layouts out so I can publish quite happily if I want to. I can save that list of sheets for repetitive batch publishing if I need to. I'm not going to, and I'm just going to close that. So back to the application menu once more. And down here, we've got drawing utilities and obviously we can close that as well. So we can close the current drawing or all drawings that we might have open. Drawing utilities are very useful. These are the sorts of commands that you sometimes might need. Where you might want to compare two drawings, you might want to audit a drawing or purge a drawing and lose all the items that you don't need. You can also recover a damaged drawing file and open the drawer and recovery manager if you need to as well. Last but not least, there's a little button down here that you can click on called options that will open up the options dialog box and this is where you can set all of your AutoCAD settings that you might need to use on a regular basis. So you'll notice there, can you see, I always save as a 2013 DWG. By default in AutoCAD at 2022 though, it would save up here to a 2018 DWG file. But what we do at LinkedIn learning is we save to 2013 to allow you to use older versions of AutoCAD to follow along with the course. There's lots of different settings in here, my plot and publish settings, my system settings, my user preferences and so on. A lot of that is covered in more of the deeper dive AutoCAD courses in the library. So I'll just cancel that to make sure that we don't make any radical changes. And that is your application menu in AutoCAD.