Subtitles of the Movie

The Shortcut Menu in AutoCAD is context sensitive, when you right click in the drawing area you will get a Shortcut Menu up here on the screen. Now you get a context sensitive Shortcut Menu if you're in the middle of a command. So for example the Shortcut Menu for the Polyline Command will be different to the Shortcut Menu for let's say the Rectangle Command. However if you've got no command selected whatsoever and you right click in the drawing area you get the Default Shortcut Menu which has things like Cut, Copy and Paste, Pan and Zoom. You can repeat the last command that you did for example which in my case if you look at the top of the Shortcut Menu was the Arrays Command. Right down at the bottom of the Shortcut Menu you have the Options Settings so when you click on Options this will take you into all settings that you use for AutoCAD to run. So you can set where AutoCAD saves files, you can set your display on the screen, you can set your Open and Save settings and what happens when you Plot and Publish. In the User Preferences Tab here though you can set whether Shortcut Menus appear in the drawing area or not. Also you've got double click editing, if you double click on an object let's say a Hatch, the Hatch Edit Dialog Box will appear. You can also customize your right clicks here by changing it, so instead of the Shortcut Menu I can have Repeat last Command. But just so you are aware Shortcut Menu is always the Default. So whenever you right click you will always get a Shortcut Menu. If I switch on the Time Sensitive right click a quick click on the right hand mouse button will be the equivalent of hitting the Enter Key, allowing you to close out AutoCAD Commands and repeat AutoCAD Commands. A longer click, longer in this case then 250 milliseconds or quarter of a second will display the Shortcut Menu. Now my personal preference is I don't normally use the Time Sensitive right click, so I'm going to turn that off, there's nothing to stop you using it though. So I'm going to cancel that there and I'm going to cancel the Options Dialog Box as well because I haven't made any changes. So let's have a look at the Shortcut Menu. Let's go into a command, let's say the Polyline Command, so I click on Polyline here on the Draw Panel, come into drawing area and the Dynamic Input prompts for the Style Point of my Polyline. I'm just going to pick a point at random and left click and then drag to the right at 0 degrees like so and in the Distance Box that's highlighted I'm going to type in a 150 and press Enter on the keyboard. That will make my first Line Segment a 150 long. But now I'm in the Polyline Command, so if I right click now, notice that the Shortcut Menu is different. In the top section there I've got Enter, Cancel and Recent Input. Enter is the equivalent of hitting the Enter Key on the keyboard or the Spacebar. Cancel is the equivalent of hitting the Escape Key on the keyboard. Recent Input you'll notice there, lots of differing coordinates there because I've been picking random coordinates whilst doing the examples so far. So there's no specific actual coordinates there but I could select one of those if it was part of my design. I could also now in the Poly Line Command put an Arc Segment in, I can close my Polyline, I can give my Poly Line a half width, a length, I can undo the last segment of my Polyline or I can give it a width. I can also utilize Snap Overrides and pick an Object Snap that I want the next Polyline segment to go to, so I've got all my Object Snaps available to me here. I can also Pan and Zoom within a command and I can also utilize the steering wheels which are primarily for 3D Drafting or I can utilize Quick Calc which will in turn bring up the calculator on the screen and allow me to calculate perhaps a distance or perhaps a radius or a Diameter of the Arc Segment that I might want to select. Notice as well on the Command Line you have Arc, Close, Half Width, Length, Undo and Width. The same as you have here on the Shortcut Menu. So that's the Shortcut Menu in a nutshell and the key points to remember here are that the Shortcut Menu is context aware. So the Options that appear on the screen differ depending on which command you're in when you right click to bring up the Shortcut Menu and this is an alternative to entering Command Options on the Command Line. I can select Arc there instead of typing A here on the Command Line, so if I type A and press Enter now that will bring up the Arc Option. So now I've got an Arc Option in my Polyline there. So I bring that down, I might give that say a 70 diameter there and press Enter and there we are, that's my keyboard input or I can now right click now , again a different context sensitive Shortcut Menu depending on what part of the Poly Line Command I'm in. So that covers the Shortcut Menus in AutoCAD.