From the course: AutoCAD 2015 Essential Training

Exploring the user interface

From the course: AutoCAD 2015 Essential Training

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Exploring the user interface

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In this video, we are going to explore AutoCAD 2015s User interface. When you first launch the program, you'll come to the New tab. And this gives you an opportunity to start a new drawing, or to open an existing document from this list. You can change the way that these documents are displayed with these buttons. So you can look at them by icon, icon and name, or the detail view. You can also sign in to Autodesk 360 over here. And I've already done that, you can see my user profile name is listed up here. Autodesk 360 allows you to save copies of your drawings in the cloud. Down here at the bottom, you'll notice there's a Learn page. And this has the videos which ship with AutoCAD. Go back to Create. And let's start a drawing from scratch. Click this button, to load the user interface. So at the top left of the interface you'll find this button. It's called the Application menu. Click to open, and you'll find a list of menus. And notice right here you have a Recent documents and the list of currently open documents. Right now we just have drawing one. You can also access program Options right here, or Exit AutoCAD. This is called the Quick Access tool bar, in this area. And it has commands such as New, Open, Save, Save As, and Plot. Undo and Redo are grayed out right now because we haven't done anything yet. This down facing arrow allows you to select different items that you can have appear in the Quick Access tool bar. This search box allows you to query the help system, and over here we have Autodesk 360 and Autodesk Exchange Apps, which extend the functionality of the program. You can also get connected with the online community right here. These standard buttons affect the whole application, whereas these affect the current drawing. This whole area, in here, is called the Ribbon, and it's organized into tabs, panels, and commands. The panels can be expanded, and you can see additional tools below. This is called a File tab, and it has the current drawing's model space, as well as any layouts that it may contain. If you click on layout1, it shows you a view of a virtual piece of paper, and you also see down here there's a tab that says layout1. I can switch back to Model space by clicking this tab, or alternatively I can go up here and click right here. If you click the Plus icon next to the File tab, it'll open a new tab. And it takes you back to that initial interface that you saw when your first launched AutoCAD. Let's go back to drawing one. These three elements are called In-Canvas controls, and each one opens a separate menu. They have to do with changing the viewpoint and the visual style. This element here is called the View Cube. This is the Navigation bar. This element here is called the Command line, and it features a scrolling list of commands. You can expand that by clicking right here, or by pressing the F2 key. And it shows us here that we've switched to Model space. And when I clicked in the drawing area, it gave this Selection command. This is called the User Coordinate System icon, or UCS icon for short, and it gives you a handy reminder of which way the x and y axes are pointing. Finally down here in the lower right hand corner of the interface you'll find all the status bar toggles. They're on when they're blue and off when they're gray. Many of the status bar toggles have menus associated with them that you can either open by clicking the Arrow, or by right-clicking. So that completes the tour of AutoCAD 2015's User interface. In the next video we'll take a closer look at the Ribbon.

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