2

The Grand Tour of AutoCAD 2014

In This Chapter

Touring the AutoCAD 2014 screens

Going bar-hopping: Title bars and the status bar

Unraveling the Ribbon

Practicing with palettes

Discovering the drawing area

Using online help

Over the years, AutoCAD’s interface has undergone many changes, ranging from a simple text menu down the right side (still the second-fastest way of using AutoCAD) to drop-down menus, toolbars, the Dashboard (which only survived two releases — 2007 and 2008), tool palettes, and, for now, the Ribbon menu.

Like the rest of this book, this chapter is written for someone who has used other Windows programs but has little or no experience with AutoCAD. Here and throughout the rest of the book, we show you how to do things by using AutoCAD’s implementation of Microsoft’s flavor of the year of its Fluent User Interface (or FUI; pronounced “foo-ey”). AutoCAD has always been big on backward compatibility, and this includes the interface.

Looking at AutoCAD’s Drawing Screen

When you first open AutoCAD, you encounter the welcome screen. We can already hear your plaintive cry: “Where do I draw? The screen is full!” Close the Welcome screen by clicking its Close button. If you don’t want to see the Welcome screen again, click the Display at Startup check box.

You may now find that the screen is still half full with the Design Feed palette. No problem — close the Design Feed palette by clicking the X in its upper left corner. AutoCAD remembers that you closed it and doesn’t open it next time.

Figure 2-1 shows the screen you then see, AutoCAD 2014’s default opening window.

Figure 2-1: AutoCAD’s default opening window.

Now you’re ready to get to work.

Working from the top down, AutoCAD’s interface has five main sections:

The Application Menu: Click the Application button (known informally as “the big, red A”) at the top-left corner of the AutoCAD window to open the AutoCAD 2014 Application Menu. It presents mostly file-related commands; from the menu, you can create new drawings, open existing drawings, save files, or print masterpieces. It also gives access to the Options command.

The Quick Access toolbar: This toolbar, which runs across the top of the screen, includes buttons for some of the most commonly used functions, such as Save and Undo. You can add functions that you use all the time and delete unneeded buttons.

The Ribbon: Whereas the Application Menu focuses on file management, the Ribbon holds commands to create and modify drawing objects.

The graphic screen: It’s the “piece of paper” on which you draw.

  Tabs: AutoCAD 2014 adds a series of tabs across the top of the graphic screen, one for each open drawing, to make it easy to jump from drawing to drawing (compared to earlier releases).

The command line: This window, the chat room between you and AutoCAD, displays your input to AutoCAD and (equally important) tells you what it needs from you.

If you’re having a problem and all else fails, read the command line.

The status bar: The status bar tells you an awful lot about how many of AutoCAD’s operating settings are set. It does more than show you settings, however, because you can set, reset, and change most of them from the status bar.

Because of the way that AutoCAD has evolved, you usually have four or five ways to invoke a command. Throughout this book, we focus on the Ribbon and on direct keyboard entry because the toolbars, menu bar, screen menus, and other elements from earlier releases aren’t turned on, by default, in AutoCAD 2014.

As slick as they are, navigating Ribbon panels and browsing the Application Menu aren’t always the most efficient ways of doing things. When you want to get real work done, you need to combine the Ribbon panels with other methods, especially entering commands and options at the keyboard or choosing them from right-click menus.

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In addition to the Drafting & Annotation workspace — the default workspace — a few additional preconfigured workspaces are available from the Workspace Switching button. However, in this book, we try to stick with the out-of-the-box Drafting & Annotation workspace. (The exception is Part V, which describes 3D modeling.)

InfoCenter and Quick Access toolbar

Now take a look at the interface features that are unique to AutoCAD.

Located at the right side of the program title bar, InfoCenter serves as Information Central in AutoCAD. You can

Search for information. Type a keyword and then click the binoculars for more information.

Sign in to your Autodesk 360 account. Click the Sign In link and log in with your username and password.

Download free or inexpensive add-ons. Click the button that looks like a half-positive, half-negative X to open the Autodesk Exchange Apps website.

Connect to Autodesk via Facebook or Twitter. Click the triangle button to see a list of links for product updates and to connect to Autodesk via the two social networks.

Find help. Click the question mark button in the InfoCenter area to open a Help page.

The Quick Access toolbar is common to all workspaces and contains frequently used commands. You can add and remove buttons by clicking the down arrow at the right end of the Quick Access toolbar and selecting or deselecting the ones you want to add or remove, respectively.

If you’re floundering, looking for the commands you can no longer find, click in the drop-down menu at the right end of the Quick Access toolbar. Select Show Menu Bar, and the familiar classic menu appears above the Ribbon.

You’re probably already familiar with the Quick Access toolbar from Microsoft Office applications. Other features AutoCAD has in common to Office are the ability to have more than one file open at a time, to cut or copy and paste between files, to tile or cascade multiple open files (see Figure 2-2), and to minimize, restore, and maximize individual files and AutoCAD itself.

Figure 2-2: The AutoCAD screen with several windowed drawings in view.

Making choices from the Application Menu

The Application Menu is accessible from all workspaces. The AutoCAD 2014 Application Menu follows the Microsoft FUI guidelines in placing file management commands there. The Application Menu is divided into nine categories. You’ll find the following commands on the Application Menu:

New: Create a new drawing from a list of templates.

Open: Open an existing drawing.

Save: Save the current drawing in the current location; if the current drawing hasn’t been saved, you’re prompted for a filename and a location.

Save As: Save the current drawing to a new filename and/or location, and make the newly named or located file the current drawing.

Export: Save the current drawing to a large variety of file formats, including Design Web Format (DWF), PDF, and several other CAD file formats.

Publish: Send a 3D model to an outside 3D printing service, or create an archived sheet set. (AutoCAD LT doesn’t support 3D.) Use eTransmit to create a package that includes all files referenced by the selected drawings, or e-mail the current drawing by using your configured e-mail client.

Print: Print a single drawing or batch-plot multiple drawings, create or modify named page setups, and manage plotters and plot styles. We cover most of these operations in Chapter 16.

Drawing Utilities: Set file properties or drawing units; purge unused blocks, layers, and styles from the current drawing; and audit or recover damaged drawings.

Close: Close the current drawing or close all drawings. If any drawings have changed, you’re prompted to save them before AutoCAD closes the file.

In addition to the Application Menu’s actual file menu items, a few other features are worth a mention:

Recent Documents: If you choose this option, the right pane displays a list of recently edited drawings that aren’t open. You can show them in a simple list or as thumbnail images, as shown in Figure 2-3. You can also pin them to stop them from scrolling off the list. Naturally enough, clicking an icon opens the drawing.

Figure 2-3: Find the drawing that you know you worked on yesterday.

Open Documents: Choose this option to see which documents are already open, and click an item to switch to it. It’s equivalent to pressing Alt+Tab to switch between open documents in any Windows program. It works the same way as the Quick View Drawings feature, described in the “Looking for Mr. Status Bar” section, later in this chapter.

AutoCAD 2014 adds a series of tabs across the top of the graphic screen, one for each open drawing. Hovering the cursor over a tab produces a quick preview of its drawing, which makes jumping from drawing to drawing much easier, compared to earlier releases.

Options: Click this button to open the Options dialog box, where you can adjust hundreds of system settings. You can also open Options by typing OP (the alias for the OPtions command).

Search: If you’re unsure of a command name or you want help on a topic, just start typing in the Application Menu’s search bar. AutoCAD 2014 quickly displays a categorized list, complete with links to start commands or to access the online Help system (see Figure 2-4).

You can search directly from the command line. Just type the search term.

Figure 2-4: If you can’t find it on the Ribbon or in the tool buttons, just start typing!

A quick way to close AutoCAD is to double-click the big, red A. AutoCAD asks whether you want to save unsaved drawings and then shuts down.

Unraveling the Ribbon

The primary interface element in the Drafting & Annotation, 3D Basics, and 3D Modeling workspaces is the Ribbon, an adjustable area that contains different collections of tabbed, task-oriented collections of panels. Those panels marked with a little black triangle on the panel label have more tools concealed on a slideout (see Figure 2-5). Click the panel label to open the slideout. You can click the pushpin icon to pin open the slideout if you don’t want it to slide home when you’re done using it.

If you use a particular Ribbon panel often, click and drag it into the drawing area. If, for example, you’re doing a whack of dimensioning, you can drag the Dimensions panel into the drawing and it stays put, even as you switch to other panels or tabs.

Figure 2-5: More tools than you can wave a Ribbon at.

You can fully customize the Ribbon, but we don’t get into customizing AutoCAD in this book. If you want to find out more, click Customization Guide in the AutoCAD 2014 online help Home page.

By default, the Ribbon is docked at the top of the screen, but you can dock it against any edge, anchored to the left or right side of the AutoCAD window, or floated. To gain some screen space, you can click the little white button to the right of the last tab on the Ribbon’s tab bar to reduce the amount of space the Ribbon occupies, or use the drop-down menu next to the little white button to tailor the Ribbon’s display to just the way you want it.

Instead of menus of grouped commands, the tabs on the Ribbon are organized by task:

Home: Contains Draw, Modify, Layers, Annotation, Block, Properties, Groups, Utilities, and Clipboard panels. Some panels may be displayed as collapsed, depending on the screen resolution. As an example, the five panels at the right end of the Annotate tab, as shown in Figure 2-5, are in a collapsed state. We cover most of the commands in these panels in other parts of the book.

Insert: Groups Block and Reference panels as well as Point Cloud tools, Import commands, and a series of commands for working with nongraphical information, including attributes, fields, and data links. We cover blocks (see Chapter 17) and external references (see Chapter 18), but a description of point clouds, importing, and data tools is beyond the scope of this book.

Annotate: Expands on the minimalist Annotation panel on the Home tab, with many more options for creating text, dimensions, leaders, and tables, as well as markup functions and a few annotation scaling tools.

Layout: Has a series of panels used to create and modify paper space layouts, and to create 2D drawing views from 3D models. We cover paper space layouts in Chapters 4 and 5, and we introduce 3D in Part V.

Parametric: Serves as home base of one of AutoCAD 2014’s most powerful features. You can apply geometric or dimensional parameters or constraints (rules of behavior) to drawing objects so that, say, two circles are always equal diameters or the length of a rectangle is always twice its width. We introduce parametric drawing in Chapter 19.

AutoCAD LT is limited when it comes to parametrics. You can modify or delete existing constraints, but you need the full version of AutoCAD to create them.

View: Contains tools and panels for controlling drawing display, working with viewports, loading various palettes, and organizing Windows functions, such as cascading open files or displaying different parts of the application window. We explain most of the features on this tab later in the book.

  Manage: Contains panels that access the Action Recorder and CAD Standards (neither of which is in AutoCAD LT) and a set of drawing management and customization tools. We don’t cover anything on the Manage tab in this book.

Output: Has panels that allow you to get those drawings off your hands by printing (also known as plotting) or publishing them, exporting them to PDF or DWF files, or simply sending them electronically to others. We cover some of these functions in Chapter 16.

Plug-Ins: Is present in both AutoCAD and AutoCAD LT, although in LT, it has only one panel instead of three. Both versions have a Content panel with a single Explore button that runs the Content Explorer tool. After you let Content Explorer index your file folders, it can winnow through all your drawings, looking for specific blocks, layers, layouts, and even text strings.

Autodesk 360: Also present in both AutoCAD and AutoCAD LT, and this time the tabs are identical. Most of the buttons fire up a login screen for the AutoCAD WS service. Using an AutoCAD WS account, you can upload drawings to a secure website and then access them on your iPad (you do have an iPad, right?) or Android device or on any computer with a web browser. You can also invite non-AutoCAD users to view and mark up your drawings or to join you for a discussion, using a standard web browser.

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Featured Apps: Has only one panel with one button, and is exactly the same as the half-positive, half-negative X in the InfoCenter.

Express Tools: Holds an invaluable set of custom commands that streamline your work procedures in pretty well every aspect of AutoCAD. The Express Tools are created when a programmer says, “Hey, how about if we try. . . .” The tools often serve as the final beta-test version of new features that are incorporated directly into later releases. They’re officially unsupported, but they’ve been an install option in many recent releases, and, mostly, they work well. Express Tools are available in only the full version of AutoCAD.

Some Ribbon buttons may be hidden under other, similar ones. For example, POLygon may be hidden under RECtangle or vice versa, depending on which you used last.

Other Ribbon tabs may exist if you purchased AutoCAD as part of a suite — a series of collections of related Autodesk products that are sold in one package.

Getting with the Program

In most of this book, we focus on 2D drafting, which is by far the easiest way to get your feet wet with AutoCAD. (Just don’t drip water on your computer.) And if you’re not already in the Drafting & Annotation workspace (the default workspace that AutoCAD opens in), click the Workspace Switching button to return to it. After you make the switch to this workspace, AutoCAD displays the interface shown earlier, in Figure 2-1.

Like all good Windows programs, AutoCAD has tooltips, those short descriptions that appear in little text boxes whenever you hover the mouse pointer over a button. In AutoCAD 2014, tooltips display two levels of information. When you hover the mouse pointer over a tool button, you first see a quick identification of the command. If you continue hovering, a longer description of the icon’s function, often with a graphical image, appears in an extended tooltip. As helpful as they are when you’re starting with AutoCAD, you’ll probably want to remove these training wheels sooner or later. You can do so in the Options dialog box. (See the online Help system for more information.)

Looking for Mr. Status Bar

The application status bar (see Figure 2-6), which appears at the bottom of the AutoCAD screen, displays — and allows you to change — several important drawing modes, aids, and settings that affect how you draw and edit in the current drawing.

You can set status bar buttons to display icons or the traditional text labels that will be familiar to you if you’ve used earlier releases. To switch from one style to the other, right-click any of the drawing mode buttons at the left side of the status bar and select or deselect Use Icons.

Figure 2-6: Status (bars) check.

We cover each status bar setting time as appropriate as we discuss its relevant commands. (See the online extras for a description of each of the status bar buttons.)

Using Dynamic Input

Press the DYN button on the status bar to activate Dynamic Input. Most command input and responses move from the command line to the graphic area of the screen, close to the current cursor location. This is supposed to increase efficiency because you don’t have to shift your focus between the command line and the current cursor location. On the other hand, many users find it too distracting to have everything dancing and flashing around the cursor, and it’s probably not good for your eyes to always be focused on the same point.

Don’t get in the habit of relying on Dynamic Input. Sometimes there simply isn’t room in the Dynamic Input tooltip to show as much information as you get at the command line.

The Dynamic Input tooltip doesn’t display options in brackets; instead, press the down-arrow key to display additional command options in rows next to the crosshairs, as shown in Figure 2-7. Pressing the up-arrow key displays previous input.

Figure 2-7: Choosing command options from the Dynamic Input menu.

We like Dynamic Input. Really, we do. But sometimes it fights with normal command input, and that can make things really confusing.

Let your fingers do the talking: The command line

The command line (or command window, or command prompt, or command area, or whatever you want to call it), as shown in Figure 2-8, is a throwback to the dark ages of AutoCAD. It puzzles newcomers and delights AutoCAD aficionados. Despite Dynamic Input, the command line is the most efficient way of performing many AutoCAD operations.

Figure 2-8: Obey the command line; that is an order.

Cozy up to the command line because it’s AutoCAD’s primary communications conduit back to you. AutoCAD displays prompts, warnings, and error messages in the command line that Dynamic Input may not show. Even if Dynamic Input gives you the same info, glancing at the command line is more efficient.

If you take away only one tip from this book, it should be this: “When all else fails, read the command line!”

The command line is a semitransparent toolbar that can float anywhere on the screen, allowing drawings to show through it. This recovers some of the drawing window area that was lost to the Ribbon. Hey, Microsoft, screens are getting wider, not taller! By default, the command line displays one command input line plus the last three input prompts, but you can change the number of input prompts that are displayed.

As a command is running, the command line often displays several options that can be invoked during the command. You invoke an option by entering the uppercase letter or letters shown in each option, such as End or Mid. It’s usually the first letter, but not always. For example, ON and OFF must be entered in full, but you can simply enter an uppercase X to eXit from a command, even if the current command has no other option that starts with an E.

You don’t even need to type the option letter. You can invoke an option by using the mouse to select it in the command line.

The key(board) to AutoCAD success

Despite (or because of) AutoCAD’s long heritage as the most successful CAD software for personal computers, newcomers are still astonished at the amount of typing they have to do. Modern programs have much less dependency on the keyboard than AutoCAD does, but as you get used to it, you’ll find that no other input method gives you as much flexibility or speed as pounding the ivories — oops, wrong keyboard!

Typing at your computer’s keyboard is an efficient way to run certain commands, and it’s the only way to run a few others. Instead of clicking a button or choosing from a menu, you can start a command by typing the command name and pressing Enter. Even better, for most common commands, you can press the short form for a command name (an alias) and press Enter. For example, you can simply type L for the Line command, C for Circle, and CO for the COpy command.

Print a list of aliases and highlight the ones you use most often. To see a complete list of command aliases, look in the AutoCAD (or AutoCAD LT) Program Parameters (PGP) file by going to the Manage tab and clicking Edit Aliases on the Customization panel. When Windows Notepad opens with the acad.pgp (or acadlt.pgp) file loaded, scroll down to the Sample Aliases for AutoCAD Commands section.

Get comfortable using the keyboard and command line. Several everyday commands are nowhere to be found on the Ribbon. If you want to run those commands, you have to type them!

AutoCAD’s AutoComplete feature can help you become a keyboard jockey. Start typing a command name, and a list appears at the cursor, showing all commands and options that start with the letters you’ve typed. You can continue until only the command appears, or you can scroll down the list and select a command.

AutoCAD 2014 adds a great deal more functionality to the command line beyond simply entering commands and options. It includes a spell checker for command names so that close enough is good enough (the same as hand grenades and dancing). For example, it recognizes the misspelled LABLE as the correct LABEL. It also has a synonym list so that entering ROUND (a non-existent command) starts the FILLET command, and it’s adaptive so that commands you use more frequently rise to the top of the suggestion list.

The following steps demonstrate how to use the keyboard to run commands and view and select options. If Dynamic Input is toggled on, press F12 to turn it off — temporarily, at least. Follow these steps to work with the command line:

1. Type L and then press Enter.

AutoCAD starts the Line command and displays the following prompt in the command line:

LINE Specify first point:

2. Click a point anywhere in the drawing area.

The command line prompt changes to

Specify next point or [Undo]:

3. Click another point anywhere in the drawing area.

AutoCAD draws the first line segment.

4. Click a third point anywhere in the drawing area.

AutoCAD draws the second line segment and prompts you:

Specify next point or [Close/Undo]:

5. To activate the Undo option, type U and press Enter.

You can type the option letter in lowercase or uppercase.

If you type an option that the command line doesn’t recognize (for example, X isn’t a valid option for the Line command), the command line displays an error message and prompts you again for another point — in this case, a point for the Line command:

Point or option keyword required.

Specify next point or [Close/Undo]:

Option keyword is programmer jargon for letters, shown in uppercase, that activate a command option. This error message is AutoCAD’s way of saying, “Huh? I don’t understand what you mean by typing X. Either specify a point or type a letter that I do understand.”

AutoCAD undoes the second line segment.

6. Type 3,2 (with no spaces) and press Enter.

AutoCAD draws a new line segment to the point whose X coordinate is 3 and Y coordinate is 2.

7. Click several more points anywhere in the drawing area.

AutoCAD draws additional line segments.

8. Type C and then press Enter.

AutoCAD draws a final line segment, which creates a closed figure and ends the Line command. A blank command line returns, indicating that AutoCAD is ready for the next command:

Command:

Here are a few other tips and tricks for effective keyboarding:

Display the much larger text window. The normal three-line command line usually shows you what you need to see, but occasionally you want to review a larger chunk of command-line history. Press F2 to see the AutoCAD text window, which is simply an enlarged, scrollable version of the command line, as shown in the left half of Figure 2-9.

Figure 2-9: My, how you’ve grown: Pressing F2 (on the left side) or Ctrl+F2 (right side) expands the command line to a command text window.

Press Esc to bail out of the current operation. Sometimes, you might get confused about what you’re doing in AutoCAD and/or what you’re seeing in the command line. If you need to bail out of the current operation, press Esc one or more times until you see a blank command line at the bottom of the command window, with nothing after it. A blank command line indicates that AutoCAD is resting, waiting for your next command.

Press Enter to accept the default action. Some command prompts include a default action in angled brackets. For example, the first prompt of the POLygon command is

Enter number of sides <4>:

The default is four sides, and you can accept it by simply pressing Enter. (That is, you don’t have to type 4 first.)

  AutoCAD uses two kinds of brackets when it prompts.

• Command options appear in regular square brackets: [Close Undo]. To activate a command option, type the letter(s) that appear in uppercase and then press Enter.

• A default value or option appears in angled brackets: <4>. To choose the default value or option, press Enter.

You can also right-click and choose Enter to input a command. You can also use the spacebar instead of Enter, as long as you’re not entering text.

Watch the command line. You can discover a lot about how to use the command line by simply watching it after every action you take. When you click a toolbar button or menu choice, AutoCAD displays the name of the command in the command line. If you’re watching the command line, you absorb the command names more or less naturally.

When AutoCAD echoes commands automatically in response to your toolbar and menu clicks, it usually adds one or two extra characters to the front of the command name:

• AutoCAD usually puts an underscore in front of the command name. For example, _LINE instead of LINE. The underscore is an Autodesk programmers' trick that enables non–English-language versions of AutoCAD to understand the English command names that are embedded in the menus.

• AutoCAD sometimes puts an apostrophe in front of the command name and any underscore. For example, 'Zoom instead of Zoom. The apostrophe indicates a transparent command; you can run a transparent command in the middle of another command without canceling the first command. For example, you can start the Line command, run the 'Zoom command transparently, and then pick up where you left off with the Line command.

Leave the command line in the default configuration. The command line, like most other parts of the AutoCAD screen, is resizable and movable. The default location (at the bottom of the AutoCAD screen) and size (one line in the command line and three semitransparent lines extending into the drawing area) work well for most people. Resist the temptation to mess with the command line’s appearance, at least until you’re comfortable with using it.

Right-click in the command line for options. If you right-click in the command line, you see a menu with some useful choices. For example, Recent Commands shows the last six commands you ran.

Press the up- and down-arrow keys to cycle through the stack of commands you’ve used recently. This is another handy way to recall and rerun a command. Press the left- and right-arrow keys to edit the command-line text you’ve typed or recalled.

Keeping tabs on palettes

Palettes are refined (well-mannered) versions of dialog boxes. Unlike regular dialog boxes, which insist on your undivided attention as long as they’re open, palettes stay discreetly in the background as you carry on with other tasks. AutoCAD still has many dialog boxes, but over the past several releases, palettes have replaced quite a few former dialog boxes.

AutoCAD 2014 contains more than a dozen palettes (less than a dozen in AutoCAD LT). Unless noted otherwise, you can open any of these palettes from the Palettes panel of the View tab. In this book, we describe just a few of them, which we cover in their appropriate chapters.

Down the main stretch: The drawing area

After you’ve taken some warm-up laps, you’re probably itching for the main event. The AutoCAD drawing area is where you do your drawing. Gee, what a surprise! In the course of creating drawings, you click points to specify locations and distances, click objects to select them for editing, and zoom and pan to get a better view of what you’re working on.

Most of this book shows you how to interact with the drawing area, but you should know a few things upfront.

Model space and paper space layouts

AutoCAD operates in two parallel universes, called spaces, which AutoCAD indicates with either two status bar buttons or two or more tabs in the lower left section of the drawing area:

Model: Where you create and modify the objects that represent things in the real world, such as wheels, wires, walls, widgets, waterways, or whatever.

Paper: Where you create particular views of these objects for plotting, usually with a title block around them. Paper space comprises one or more layouts, each of which can contain a different arrangement of model space views and different title block information. See Chapter 15 for information about creating paper space layouts, and see Chapter 16 for the lowdown on plotting them.

Drawing on the drawing area

Here are a few things you should know about the AutoCAD drawing area:

Get in the habit of looking at the command line after every action you take. Efficient, confident use of AutoCAD requires that you continually glance from the drawing area to the command line (to see those all-important prompts!) and then back up to the drawing area. This sequence isn’t a natural reflex for most people, and that’s why the Dynamic Input tooltip at the crosshairs was introduced. But you still get information from the command line that you don’t get anywhere else.

When you click in the AutoCAD drawing area, you’re almost always performing an action. Clicking at random in the drawing area isn’t quite as harmless in AutoCAD as it is in many other Windows programs. AutoCAD interprets clicks as specifying a point or selecting objects for editing. If you get confused, press Esc a couple of times to clear the current operation and return to the naked command line.

You can still right-click. In most cases, you can right-click in the drawing area to display a menu with some options for the current situation.

Fun with F1

Unfortunately, in AutoCAD, F1 doesn’t stand for Formula One. Pressing F1 at any time opens the online Help window, shown in Figure 2-10, as does clicking the question mark.

Click the down arrow beside the question mark to open the Help menu with additional help-related options.

As is the case with most Windows programs, AutoCAD Help is context-sensitive; for example, if you start the Line command and just don’t know what to do next, Help will, er, help. You can browse the online Product Documentation from the AutoCAD 2014 Help page or type words in the Search box to look for specific topics. In this book, we sometimes direct you to the AutoCAD online Help system for information about advanced topics.

Figure 2-10: Help is at your F1 fingertip.

AutoCAD is one program where you really need to take advantage of the online Help resources. AutoCAD contains many commands, options, and quirks. (Alas, the quirks aren’t listed in the online Help system.) Everyone from the greenest beginner to the most seasoned expert can find out something by using the AutoCAD online Help. Take a moment to peruse the home page of the main Help system so that you know what’s available. Throughout this book, we direct you to pages in the Help system that we think are particularly useful, but don’t be afraid to explore on your own when you get stuck or feel curious.

The good news is that the online Help system is always being monitored and updated to reflect how people are using it and to update any errors or omissions. The bad news is that if you don't have a current Internet connection, all you get is the local stripped-down version. The good news is that you can go to www.autodesk.com, where you can download and install the latest version of the full-meal deal. After you do so, AutoCAD always looks for an Internet connection first so that you get the latest help — but if it can't connect, it falls back to the downloaded version you installed. The install program offers to download Help, which should be pretty well mandatory for your laptop.