From the course: AutoCAD 2019 Essential Training

The status bar - AutoCAD Tutorial

From the course: AutoCAD 2019 Essential Training

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The status bar

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- [Instructor] Once again we're staying in the Interface.dwg file for this particular chapter and as usual you can download that if you haven't done so already from the website to follow along with the video. Now, we're going to start looking at the status bar in AutoCAD in the AutoCAD interface and it's in the bottom right corner of the AutoCAD screen. It's all these little icons down here. So, you'll notice you've got things like grid mode, snap mode and as you come across you've got ortho mode, you've got polar tracking, some of the more important ones are things like object snap tracking, object snaps and so on. Now, those are all displayed on your AutoCAD screen and they're known as your drafting settings, so things like your object snaps are always going to be on so you can snap accurately to the objects in your AutoCAD drawings. But you can switch on different elements of that status bar using this sort of burger type icon here and you can see it looks a bit like a burger. You've got the top and the bottom of the bun and the meat in between. Click on those three lines and you can see that you can customize your status bar by switching on whichever status and drafting settings you want to use. So, something like dynamic input for example. You might want that to be able to switched on and off on the status bar. So, if I click on that can you see you get a little tick next to it? I come back down to the little burger icon here to switch off the customization and what you'll notice now is dynamic input is here and I can switch it on and off. So, if I go to something like line command, let's say, Home tab, like so and in the Draw panel and I'll click on Line. Now you'll notice as I move around the screen now you can see that the dynamic input is prompting me for the first point of my line. I'll just hit escape a couple of times and cancel that command. If I go down to my dynamic input now and I switch that off by clicking on it you'll notice it goes gray and that's part of the status bar, you switch these drafting settings on and off. If I now go back to the line command, you'll notice there's no prompt on the cross hair, no dynamic input because I've switched it off and I can go into the middle of a command and do that, switch it on and as you can see the prompt is back on the cross hairs again. That's the whole idea of the status bar is you can go in and out of it at any time when you're working in a command in an AutoCAD drawing. So, I'll just hit escape there to cancel the line command. Now, another one that is always very useful on the status bar is coordinates, your coordinate read out, so we go back down here to the bottom right corner to the three lines, the customization, and what we need is coordinates and it's right up there at the top of the list. There's coordinates right there, so I click there and it switches the coordinates on, click on the little three lines and as you can see I've now customized the status bar and as I move the cross hair around can you see the coordinates are changing giving me the read out of where the cross hair is in the AutoCAD model space. So, that's your status bar which is a very, very useful tool. Also you'll notice on the status bar that you've got little fly out arrows as well. So, if I come down to something like object snaps and click on the fly out there, it gives me the option to switch on and off my running object snaps, so you'll notice there at the moment I've got endpoint, center, intersection and extension switched on as my running object snaps that are on all the time, so if I click on midpoint, I get a tick next to it which means that midpoint is now one of my running object snaps as well so it will always highlight midpoint snaps if I need them. I click on the little fly out just to close it out again and as you can see it closes the fly out menu. Now, on those fly out menus as well if we go back to object snap you'll see that we've got Object Snap Settings. Now, the settings bring up a dialog box and as you can see there's the tick boxes for the running object snaps again but you'll notice now that all of the settings on the status bar are available by way of tabs in the Drafting Settings dialog box as well. So, you can go in there and switch things like snap and grid on and off there in the Drafting Settings dialog box instead of using the status bar. So, there's two ways of setting everything up. I'll just click on Cancel to close the dialog box and that's how you can utilize your status bar to make sure that all of your drafting settings are set up the way that you need them so that you can work effectively within your AutoCAD drawings.

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