AutoCAD: Tips & Tricks

- [Instructor] Welcome to another AutoCAD tip and trick. Today we're going to look at automatic dimensioning. And in AutoCAD this can be very useful because it means you don't have to keep clicking on all the origin points of your dimensions when you're dimensioning an AutoCAD drawing. We've got a very simple drawing for you. You can download it from the library, it's called AutomaticDimensioning.dwg. And there it is on the screen there. It's a very simple shape with a couple of circles. And you'll notice we are on the layer dims at the moment, in the layers panel.

And if you go to the annotation fly out here on the home tab as well, you'll notice we're using the dimension style training. Make sure you're using the appropriate dimension style. Now the automatic dimensioning is available with this dimension command here, in the annotation panel on the home tab and it's also in the annotate tab in the dimensions panel as well. I prefer to stick with the home tab, just my personal preference, up to you which one you use. So we've got our dimension star, we've got our dimension layer and we've got the objects that we want to dimension.

So I click on this dimension command and I come into the drawing area. Now you'll notice there's lots of options down there on the command line. If I right click now I can specify what type of dimension I need. So if i select angular, and I now pick let's say two lines, one and two, as soon as I do that, can you see it places the dimension there, the angular dimension. And I'm just going to come out a little bit, there's my dimension there. Quick and easy.

I don't have to worry too much about the type of dimension I want. Now the good thing is, I'm still in my automatic dimension command. Now it's says select objects or specify first extension line origin. So if I just go and hover over a line, what happens? Well look at that, I can actually dimension a line and I just hover over it. How cool is that? So I click on the line and I drag, I don't have to specify the origin points of the dimension. All I've got to do there is hover over the object that needs to be dimensioned.

So there's a line there and as I come in here like so there's another dimension. I'll just drag that one up, let's just zoom out and pan a little. And as I come out there's my 11 dimension like so. And it's that quick and it's that easy. So if I hover over a circle what happens? Let's get in nice and close. As I touch on the edge of it there can you see, select circle to specify diameter or. Now if I press the down arrow on the keyboard, I can specify that I want a radius instead. I'll just come out a little bit here like so, hover there, click there and there's my radius dimension there as well.

So I'll click to place. The benefit I've got with all of this is I'm all in one place, in one command, dimensioning all the different dimension types. So I can just hover here again, zoom in, hover over this line, there's another dimension there, drag it out this way and as you can see it's just two clicks. I don't have to worry about origin points because AutoCAD works that out for me. So as you can see there, that automatic dimensioning, once you've got a dimension layer and a dimension style or setup it's very quick and easy to dimension your objects in AutoCAD.