AutoCAD, by far, is the biggest name in the market for CAD and as people look to find ways of using it they are confronted by 3 different versions of the program, hundreds of thousands of add-ons, and even 4th party software. That is software written for software that runs inside AutoCAD. With today's AutoCAD you have a choice of over a dozen programming languages to choose from, including most popularly that of LISP, DEISEL, and now Visual Basic. Many people open ACAD and install it, and start using it. This is fine, but if you watch experts working ACAD, you'll quickly find them using all sorts of LISP routines, Hotkeys, Shortcuts, Icons, and Marcos. Unfortunately, many offices have neither the skills nor the time to figure out how to improve themselves. In today's issue we'll look at a few simple ways to improve your speed within AutoCAD.
The most basic thing that anyone can do is to stop using the icons for basic commands, and instead use hotkeys. To do so though you will need to create for yourself a list of hotkeys that you can use. This is actually fairly simple to do. If you use DOS use the Edit command, in Win 3.x, open WordPad, and if you Win95, open Write or NotePad. Do not try to use MS Word, WordPerfect, or any other large commercial word processor. Large commercial word processors will add extra formatting information that they need to the document, and ACAD doesn't know what to do with that. Once in the program of your choice, open the file C:\ACAD13\COM\SUPPORT\ACAD.PGP for ACAD 13 and C:\ACAD12\SUPPORT\ACAD.PGP for ACAD 12. This file's location will vary if you changed the default installation directories. Once open page down till you see the following:
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