Autocad Tip

This tip is for the Autocad user who dedicates their left-hand to the keyboard, as many of you do. The Command Alias Editor allows you to create custom keyboard shortcuts for Autocad commands. For example, I always set "C " to intiate the copy command and "PL" for polyline.
You will find the Command Alias Editor under the Express menu, then Tools and Command Alias Editor, you should see the dialog box below.
To add a shortcut simply click Add, and in the New Command Alias dialog box type in your desired Alias (or keyboard shortcut), then select the Autocad command you would like it to intiate.

Squirrel MMA

Ummm.....I don't really know what to say about this picture, I thought it was cool though. Feel free to leave a caption!

2009 Roads and Bridges Conference

Registration is now open for the 2009 Bentley Roads and Bridges Conference.
Microstation, GEOPAK, and InRoads are just some of the Bentley products that will be featured.


A quick tip for the Autocad user trying to learn Microstation, to quickly select multiple objects without having to go to the "Element Selection" dialog box. Just hold down "Ctrl+shift" while you window multiple objects and they will be selected!

Basic Terminology

Below are some basic Microstation terms and there Autocad equivalents. These are not all the terms you may need to know, but just some common ones to get you started.

Exchange

Here is a quick Microstation tip and a useful tool. In XM, Microstation brought us the "Exchange" tool. The neat thing about this is if you need to edit a reference, the exchange command will take you to the exact location in the selected reference!

Basically you just click an object in your desired reference, then right click and choose Exchange, and it will close your active file and open up your reference file at that exact location.

Tiger wins 2nd in a row!

On a separate note, Congratulations to Tiger for his 16th victory. This is his 7th consecutive win on this course! I look forward to watching him this week at the PGA Championship.

Autocad Sheet Sets

Autocad Sheet Set is one of my favorite features of Autocad. I will always take time to create a sheet set for my projects even if it's just a few sheets. Being able to group sheets together and automatically update sheet numbers, sheet titles, sheet index, make this one of my favorite features. By now most Autocad users are pretty familiar with the concept and process of the Sheet Set Manager so I will not go into that. But I wish Microstation would have done something similar to the Sheet Set Manager, in Microstation XM they added "fields" to the list of new features. Basically the same concept as Autocad fields, you can link them to different file and element properties. But the one thing missing is a central location to edit these fields. You can create fields for just about anything in XM, but if you need to edit or change these fields (which is always the case) you have to go back into each individual file to accomplish this. This could have been a great feature Bentley. Score 1 Autodesk!

Gotta love Thursday morning traffic!

Always love the Thursday morning traffic jam on the way into work!!!

Autocad 2010

Well Autocad 2010 is out and has many new features and tools. While I can't wait to get my hands on some of the new features (my company will not deploy the software until this fall). I can't help but think that this is just another round of new features and tools that may pass me by. While I am trying to be efficient in both Autocad and Microstation, I find myself using less and less of the newer tools that come out with Autocad, and mainly because they are coming out with new features and tools every year. I just endup using only the tools that are applicable to what I do and I endup spending more time fighting my way thru the new features and constant changes. Am I still considered efficient then? I can still move around in Autocad and get my job done efficiently but I am not familiar with the action recorder and I never really got to comfortable with the ribbon interface. Does anyone else out there think that Autocad is pushing out there software to fast? Or is this just the result of trying to keep up with Autocad and Microstation?

Autocad commands in Microstation

Here is a quick tip for those Autocad users who may need to move around in Microstation.

Microstation has a built in set of key-ins that will let you execute Autocad commands! All you need to do is go to the Utilities menu and select Key-in. Then in the Key-in window type in dwg and then autocad command, then hit enter.