Subtitles of the Movie

You will hear me mention the Shortcut Menu regularly throughout this AutoCAD 2010 course. The Shortcut Menu is an abbreviation for the right-hand mouse button context-sensitive shortcut menu. You can see why I only call it the Shortcut Menu. One, it's a real mouthful and it's very difficult to say and two, having to say that all the time is obviously going to be difficult when I'm trying to demonstrate examples to you on this particular AutoCAD 2010 course. Now, the Shortcut Menu is basically brought up on the screen by right clicking on the mouse. If you haven't got a command selected and you right click, you will bring up the Default Shortcut Menu and as you can see you can repeat, input and previous commands. You can cut, Copy and Paste. You can pan and zoom. There sub-object selection filters, there's quick select, there's quick count, there's lots of different options there and if you'll pardon the pun, the most common option is Options here at the bottom of the Shortcut Menu. As you can see there, it brings up the Options Dialog Box and allows you to work with all the different tabs in the Options Dialog Box. If you go to the User Preferences Tab, you can also click on this button here, right click Customization. You can customize what your Shortcut Menu does in AutoCAD. You'll notice my default settings, my personal default settings are Shortcut Menu, Shortcut Menu, Shortcut Menu. You can also turn on a time-sensitive right click. That will allow you to perform a quick right click on the mouse to replicate the Enter Key on the keyboard or if you hold down the right-hand mouse button for longer, it will display the Shortcut Menu. Personally, I use the keyboard for Enter. I don't tend to use the mouse so I don't have that ticked but again, it's personal preference. You can customize your user interface to what you're comfortable with. So I'm going to cancel that there. I'm also going to cancel the Options Dialog Box there as well. Now, we're in a drawing here that is showing. Now what I need to do here is make sure on my object snaps at the bottom of the screen here, I'm just going to go to Settings and I'm going to make sure that my node snap is on here like so. So it's a right click over your OSNAP here, go to Settings on the Shortcut Menu again, again another Shortcut Menu and make sure that your node snap is on, that one there. And OK it. Right, we've got a layer of objects here you'll notice. So I click on the Down Arrow there and you've got objects there. I'm going to make sure that I'm on that red objects layer. Now, this particular drawing is available with this video course so you can open this drawing in AutoCAD and work along with this particular part of the course. Now, what we're going to do here, we're going to utilize the Shortcut Menu to draw a polyline. Now before I do that, I'm just going to show you the Line Command here. If I click on the Line Command and pick a point over here and left click, as I drag now you can see that AutoCAD, using the dynamic input, is prompting me to enter values. I'm just literally going to left click anywhere on the screen like that and if I right click now, look. The Shortcut Menu looks different. That's because I've purely got the commands that are available to me in a context-sensitive environment for the line command. So I can undo that last segment if I want to and it will undo that last line segment. I'm going to hit Escape now just to come out of my line command and we're going to go up to this icon here. It's on the Draw Panel on the Home Tab and it's this one here; polyline. It creates a 2d polyline. So I click. At my start point I'm going to utilize my OSNAPs, make sure they're on down here. So I'm going to hover over that node snap there, left click. I'm now going to place a line segment with the first part of my polyline here and left click so there's my line part of my polyline. I now right click and there's my Shortcut Menu with all my polyline options there. So notice now I can flick straight into arc by selecting Arc on the Shortcut Menu and then down to this node snap here. Left click; right click again now to bring up the Shortcut Menu and I want a line segment this time so I select Line on the Shortcut Menu. I go to this node snap here, left click and now what I'm going to do is I'm going to right click again and select Arc on the Shortcut Menu again and go up to this point here, left click. I'm then going to right click again and I'm going to go Enter because I finished my polyline. And as you can see there, that is now a polyline made up of arch and line segments purely drawn by using the Polyline Command and the Shortcut Menu.