Back to Basics:

Introduction to AutoCAD:

Session 1: Starting AutoCAD for the First Time (covering the ribbon, man menu,
toolbars, print, save)

Hello everyone and welcome to Autodesk Webinars AutoCAD Back to Basics series.
My name is Scott Green and I will be your presenter. With me today is Zac Travis
and he will be our moderator for this session.

Today I would like to start our first session in this series off with an introduction to
AutoCAD 2016. In this series we will cover settings in AutoCAD, going over basic
commands, controls, the ribbon and other essential features that will get you
started with the software. If you should have any questions during this presentation
please feel free to type your questions into the chat window, also at the end of our
presentation we will have a 15 minute FAQ session.

To give you some information about myself, again my name is Scott, I have been
with Autodesk for two years now and I have supported Navisworks, Revit, A360, and
I currently support Plant 3D, AutoCAD, and AutoCAD LT. My co-host Zac has been
supporting Autodesk products for 15 years and currently supports mechanical,
electrical, AutoCAD, AutoCAD for MAC, and AutoCAD LT.

The purpose of this course is to walk a new user or a user coming back to AutoCAD
who isnt familiar with the new layout, through AutoCAD 2016. Todays lesson will
begin with your first instance of AutoCAD after install.

When you first start up AutoCAD 2016 you will notice our start screen, on the left
hand side you will see get started with a large button that says start drawing
and underneath will be a drop down menu for templates. Pressing this button will
create a new drawing file, using the drop down menu you can select your AutoCAD
templates.

To the left of the get started section you will see learn, you can also see this on
the bottom left-center of the screen. Pressing this will take you to our tutorial
section, I will go over this page after we finished with the main page. If you select
create on the far right hand side or the bottom center-right, this will take you back
to the main page.

Underneath the start drawing button you have selections for opening files, open a
sheet set, download more templates, or explore our sample drawings.
Selecting open files will bring up the select file dialog, from here you can navigate
to you drawings stored on your local machine, the network, A360, buzzsaw, or FTP
sites. You can open .dwg, .dws, .dxf, and .dwt files from here.

Moving right from the get started section is your recent documents, you can display
your recent drawings as large thumbnails, medium sized thumbnails with details, or
a details list. Selecting the entry will open the corresponding file.

To the far right we have the connect section. You can select to connect to A360, or
you can click on send feedback to send us some feedback.

Lets go back to the Learn page now.

On the far left you will see the Whats New section, here you will see a selection of
our newest how-to videos.

In the center is Getting Started Videos, here you can learn how to tour the user
interface as we will show you today, how to create 2D objects, how to draw, and
various other topics.

On the right hand side are our learning tips and our online resources such as our
training offers and our support services.

Going back to the create page, on the main screen lets go ahead and start a new
drawing by clicking on start drawing.

Above the model space, as you could see from the main screen, we have the ribbon.
The ribbon will display various tabs such as the home tab for basic drawing
commands, the annotate tabs for mtext and dimensions, and the view tab which
shows options for the UCS, view cube, tool palettes, and sheet set manager.

Above the ribbon you have your quick access tool bar for creating new drawings,
opening drawings, save, save as, print, undo and redo, and the drop down menu for
the customize quick access toolbar.

The customize quick access toolbar will show a list as to what you would like to
show on the quick access toolbar , you can check mark to add tools or uncheck to
remove them, you can also move the position of the quick access toolbar to show
underneath the ribbon.

The far upper left hand corner you have the main menu icon. Clicking this brings up
a drop down menu showing many of the same options on the quick access toolbar
but also some additional functions such as export, publish, drawing utilities, and
options.
Clicking on drawing utilities will show give you the options to audit, purge, or
recover the drawing, very useful tools when you are experiencing drawing
corruption such as not being able to open a drawing file.

Moving down we have the ribbon, from the ribbon you will see it organized into
tabs, the basic tabs showing will be Home, Insert, Annotate, Parametric, 3D Tools,
Visualize, View, Manage, Output, Add-ins, A360, Express Tools, Featured Apps, and
Performance. You can add or remove tabs from the ribbon by right clicking in the
empty space to the right of the tabs and clicking on show tabs.

The home tab will have your basic drawing, modification, annotation, layer, block,
properties, groups, utilities, clipboard, and view functions.

The insert tab will contain functions for block attributes, block definitions,
references, point clouds, imports, data, linking, location settings, and design center
content.

The annotate tab will have expanded annotation functions for text, dimensions,
leaders, tables, markups, and scaling.

The parametric tab has your geometric constraints, dimensional constraints, and
constraint management functions.

The 3D tools tab will have your advanced 3d block modeling tools, solid editing
tools, surfacing tools, meshes, sectioning tools, selection tools, and coordinate tools
for 3d objects.

The Visualize tab will have functions for lighting, sun location, materials, camera
settings, animations, rendering, views, coordinates, visual styles, model viewports,
and cloud rendering.

The View tab will contain options for viewport tools, viewport models, palettes, and
interface.

The manage tab has tools for recording actions, customization of the user interface,
loading applications, and CAD standards.

From the output tab you can plot/publish or export to pdf or dwf.

From the addins tab you can explore content, go to the app exchange, import a skp
file, or launch the screencast recorder.

In the A360 tab you will see your tools for A360 drive, sync, the design feed, and
synching your settings.

With the express tools tab you will have your features for blocks, text, layouts,
hatches, dimensioning, xdata tools, and url web options.
The featured apps tab will display a list of our featured app exchange apps and
allow quick access to the app exchange.

And finally, the performance tab will allow you to create performance reports.

Moving down to the bottom of the UI you will see in the left hand corner the tabs for
model space and paper space including your layouts.

In the center you will find the command line, from here you can manually enter
specific commands. You can expand the command line to show command line
history, customize the command line, or close the command line.

Moving to the right hand side we have the status bar. From here you will see tools
that will tell you if you are in model or paper space, options for the grid display,
snap mode, orthographic mode, polar tracking, isometric drafting, displaying
snapping of reference lines, snap cursor to 2d reference points, display annotative
objects, display annotation scales, adjust the annotation scale of the current view,
switch the workspace (this is also possible form the quick access toolbar as I had
mentioned) enable the annotation monitor, isolate objects, enable or disable
hardware acceleration (the command for this in the command line is 3dconfig),
clear your screen, and other options.

Lastly, to the far right edge of the UI, we have the viewcube and your
view/pan/zoom options. With the viewcube you can rotate your model view or set
the UCS/WCS.

This concludes my presentation, we will now open up some time for any questions
related to the material covered during this presentation.