From the course: AutoCAD 2019 Essential Training

Editing dimensions and dimension overrides - AutoCAD Tutorial

From the course: AutoCAD 2019 Essential Training

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Editing dimensions and dimension overrides

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- [Instructor] Once again, we're starting another chapter now in our AutoCAD Essential Training course. And we're going to look at some more dimensioning techniques that you can utilize when you're annotating your AutoCAD drawings. Now, we've got a nice new drawing for you to use. It's called MoreDimensioning.dwg and you can see it there on the screen. As usual, you can download it from the website to follow along with the videos. Once you've got the drawing loaded up, make sure that you're using the A-ANNO-DIMS layer, that one there, because that A stands for architecture, ANNO is annotation, and DIMS, obviously, dimensions. And then, what you want to do, is we're going to zoom in on the top-left corner of the drawing, where the J and the I gridlines are, so that we can see the dimensions more clearly, like so. So a little bit of zooming and panning, so that you can see the 3050 dimension and the 5250 dimension. And what we're going to look at is editing dimensions and also dimension overrides. Now, you'll notice at the moment, that the 3050 dimension there is sitting nice and neatly in the middle of the dimension based on the dimension style. Select that dimension, and you'll see it's all one object. If you hover over that central grid, you can see there that you can actually edit the dimension using all the tools available. So, if I move text only, for example, that will allow me to move the text of the dimension wherever I want it to go. So I might want to shift it a little to the left, using my polar tracking, hit Escape to deselect, and that allows me to obviously perhaps have some objects here, to the right of the dimension text. Very quick and easy. What about dimension overrides? Now, dimension overrides are in the properties of the dimension. So, what I'll do, is I'll select the 5250 dimension here, like so, and what I'll do is I'll right-click and go to Properties on the shortcut menu. Now, there's a lot of information on dimensions in the Properties palette, but if you scroll down, all the way down to the Text panel here, you can see there's a Text override, just at the bottom. So, if I click in there like so, I can actually put some text in there instead of the actual dimension text, the 5250. Now, if I do want to keep that 5250 in there, I need to put the greater than and less than brackets. So, what I'm going to do, is I'm going to type Overall, like so, and then greater than and less than, those two little sort of arrow markers tell AutoCAD to keep the dimension text in place. So, it's an Overall 5250 dimension. I'll press Enter now, and you can see that update in the drawing. So what I can do now is I can close the Properties palette, hit Escape to deselect, and that now says Overall dimension 5250. You can see what a difference that makes when you're editing dimensions in your AutoCAD drawings. So, not only can you edit the dimension text and move it around, but you can also override the dimension text if you want to, as well.

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