AutoCAD Beginner Training – How to take advantage of the Application Menu to get around AutoCAD more quickly

Welcome back to my AutoCAD beginner training series. In this article, I show you how to use the Application Menu. This is a shortcut button stashed full of useful administrative commands; your one-stop shop for all items of an administrative nature.

I apologize for the delay in posting a new article; I’ve been quite busy getting my kids back to school as well as harvesting and preserving fruit and vegetables from my giant gardens. ‘Tis that time of year in Calgary, Alberta; the frost is gonna kick our asses pretty soon; just enough to kill all my tomatoes, and then it’ll be smoking hot until mid-October, thanks to global warming. This summer it was hotter here than in Los Angeles!

Let’s get to work. Click the Application Menu button; it’s located at the top left of your AutoCAD screen:

Application Button

Figure 01 – The application menu button, at the top-left of your screen. One-stop shop for admin commands in AutoCAD.

When you click on it, a big menu flies out. Many of these commands will be totally familiar to you. This menu stores all the administrative commands you need in AutoCAD. Some of the basics you’ll know how to use: New, Open, Save, Save As, Print, Close (document), Exit (the program).

AutoCAD Beginner Training – The Application Menu Button Basics – get around AutoCAD quickly

Figure 02 – Click the button to get this big menu flyout.

There’s also Export, Publish, Utilities, Recent Documents, Open Documents, and Options. Note that this is where we access both document-wide and system-wide options for AutoCAD, such as setting up units of measurement, gridlines, intervals for the gridlines, colors and more.

Here’s the Recent Documents button–I’m clicking on it in the screen shot below. Click this button to see recently used documents, right in the menu’s panel that lists documents.

AutoCAD Beginner Training – The Application Menu Button Basics – get around AutoCAD quickly

Figure 03 – The Recent Documents button.

Right beside the Recent Documents button is the Open Documents button. Click here to see a list of currently open documents.

AutoCAD Beginner Training – The Application Menu Button Basics – get around AutoCAD quickly

Figure 04 – The Open Documents button.

You can also choose how to display the recent documents–an ordered list (alphabetical, for example), by access date, by size, and by file type. This makes it easier for you to pick a document.

AutoCAD Beginner Training – The Application Menu Button Basics – get around AutoCAD quickly

Figure 05- How to sort your documents.

Next to the sort type drop down menu is a display drop down menu, that lets you choose how the display of documents looks–you can see small icons, large icons, small images, and large images. You’d use the images to help you identify documents quickly, and if you need greater detail, just use the large images option. You can store quite a few recently used documents in this list–up to 50, in fact! So this is a handy way to navigate through documents that you use frequently, etc.

Here is what small icons look like:

AutoCAD Beginner Training – The Application Menu Button Basics – get around AutoCAD quickly

Figure 06 – how to display your documents.

Here are large icons:

AutoCAD Beginner Training – The Application Menu Button Basics – get around AutoCAD quickly

Figure 07 – large icons

Here are small images:

AutoCAD Beginner Training – The Application Menu Button Basics – get around AutoCAD quickly

Figure 08 – small images

And here are large images:

AutoCAD Beginner Training – The Application Menu Button Basics – get around AutoCAD quickly

Figure 09 – documents displayed with large images.

This concludes part 1 of this AutoCAD beginner training series on using the application menu button. Stay tuned for part 2. To learn AutoCAD, please purchase my excellent course at https://www.video-tutorials.net/product-category/autocad-video-tutorials/. If you’d like to see some video samples, please visit my youtube channel at http://www.youtube.com/videotutorials2. Here is a link to one of my AutoCAD training for beginners series: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLx-VY2mDlK2GNtcL0Y7qSBcDlL9wkTvA-

Thanks! Kind regards, Rosanna D – VTN  www.video-tutorials.net