From the course: AutoCAD LT Essential Training

The application menu - AutoCAD LT Tutorial

From the course: AutoCAD LT Essential Training

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The application menu

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- [Instructor] We're starting a new chapter now in our AutoCAD LT essential training course and what we're going to be looking at is getting started with the AutoCAD LT interface. Now, the interface itself can be quite daunting to a new user of AutoCAD LT. So, we're going to take you through it step by step, so you know where everything is. We've got a new drawing for you to use, so that you can follow along with the videos in the chapter. It's called interface.dwg. You can download it from the library, save it locally, and obviously use it to follow along with the videos in this chapter. You can see I've got it open at the moment on the screen. It looks remarkably similar to the one that was in the introduction videos for this course. That's because it is and what we're going to do is use the same drawing to take is through the interface in AutoCAD LT. Now the first thing we're going to look at is the application menu in AutoCAD LT. And that's up in the top left hand corner of your screen. It's right up here and there's a little fly out arrow next to the big red A. Just click on it, and there's your application menu. Now, there's a lot of icons there. Don't worry about that. All of these icons perform a specific function within AutoCAD LT. Some of them are very self explanatory. So, if we look at the pane on the left hand side, you can see that I can go to a new drawing. I can open up a drawing. I can save a drawing. I can save as, so I can save as a different drawing. I can also import, I can bring in other file types. I can export to known file types as well. I can publish by way of batch plotting drawings. I can also e-transmit for example, create a package of drawings and send them to somebody on my project team for example. I can email a drawing. I can also share a view and share it online. And we'll talk about that in a little more detail later on in this particular chapter. I can also print my drawings as well. I can print them, I can batch plot them. I can setup page setups, manage my plotters, and so on. I've got various drawing utilities available to me in AutoCAD LT. Such as drawing properties, draw and compare, units, auditing, purging, and recovering damaged drawing files. Last but not least, I can close the current the drawing or I can close all drawings I may have opened, because I can have multiple drawings open in AutoCAD LT as well. If I just move away from that now, it goes back to my little list of drawings here, that I've had open already. Now, if you're working on a particular project, the nice thing is, I can pin these drawings to the list. So, my interface drawing that I'm using at the moment, if I pin it there, every time I now go to the application menu, this will stay in the list. This list will eventually renew itself, once you get to a certain number of drawings and then it will just refresh. If you've got a drawing pinned like the interface drawing is at the moment, it will always stay at the top of the list like it is at the moment. I'll just unpin that now. Now, there's some other settings as well. I can look at my drawings by way of an ordered list or by the access date when they were opened, by the size of the file, or by type of the file. I can also, if I click here, go to small icons, large icons. I can even look at small images of the drawings themselves or large images of the drawings. Now obviously, that takes up quite a bit of screen space. I tend to prefer the small icon setting. Purely because I can see the little blue and yellow DWG icon and it gives me the name of the file. Now, there's a couple of other bits that are really useful in the application menu. I can search commands right here. So, if I type in the line command for example, it gives me all the information about the line command in all the the different online help screens and everything else you can get out in AutoCAD LT. If I just delete that now, takes me back to my application menu again. Notice I can type the word in and click on the magnifying glass there if I want to. Down at the bottom here, we've got our options. If I click on options now, this will open up the options dialogue box for AutoCAD LT. This is all of the information where AutoCAD LT is setup. So, you've got things like where it finds all the files, how it displays, how it opens and saves, how it plots and publishes. The system, how it works, what user preferences you can set. When you're drafting for example, you can set settings as well. And when you're selecting objects, there's different settings as well. I'm just gonna cancel that because I don't want to change any of those option settings. I'm gonna go back up to the application menu and click on the fly out again. Last but not least, which I didn't click on, is is exit AutoDesk, AutoCAD LT, down there at the bottom. Now, when I click on that, it closes down all of AutoCAD LT and it will prompt you to save any drawings that you haven't saved previously. So, close down the whole shebang, the whole AutoCAD LT will be closed down that way. Where if I use close here, it's only closing the drawings that I've got open in AutoCAD LT. So, that pretty much covers your application menu in AutoCAD LT and what we'll do now is move onto the next part of the interface.

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