Subtitles of the Movie

You will hear me mention the term Status Bar quite a lot in this AutoCAD 2010 Course. The Status Bar is located at the bottom of the AutoCAD screen. Now you'll notice, as I move my crosshair around, you'll see those numbers changing in the bottom left corner. That is my Coordinate Readout, so as I move the crosshair around the coordinates are telling me the actual location of the crosshair in the Drawing Area on the AutoCAD screen. Now you'll notice, as we move along the Status Bar, we have our Drafting Settings: SNAP; GRID; ORTHO; POLAR; OSNAP; OTRACK; DUCS, or Dynamic UCS; DYN, Dynamic Input; LWT there, Show-Hide Lineweights; and QP is Quick Properties. Now all of those are activated by clicking on them on the Status Bar. As we move along we have QuickView Layouts, and also Quick View Drawings. We'll cover those in more depth later on in the Course. I also have the tools there where I can Pan, I can Zoom. I can use SteeringWheels, and also Show motion in a 3D drafting environment, as well. My Annotation Scale is displayed. If I click on the arrow there I can change my Annotation Scale if I need to. In this case I don't so I hit Escape. Annotation Scale, again, will be covered in more depth later on in the Course. The other two Annotation Icons there are Annotation Visibility, and Automatically adding annotation scales. Now moving along we have 2D Drafting and Annotation there, which is our Workspace Switching that we've already covered. So if I click there you can see there's the Shortcut Menu for my Workspaces. You'll also notice when we worked with Icon Toolbars we can lock our Toolbar or Window positions by using the Padlock there and right-clicking, and that will allow us to switch on or off our Locked or Unlocked options. Right at the end, though, you'll notice, I have this little box here. I can have a Clean Screen. What that will do is it will clear all of the menus, like the Status Bar, away from the AutoCAD screen. I don't want to do that. Be very careful when you click it because once you've done it you don't have the Icon to switch it off again, so you need to type in Clean Screen On, or Clean Screen Off. I want this little down arrow just here. Application Status Bar Menu. If I click on that it allows me to switch anything on the Status Bar on or off, so if I switch Paper Model on that will bring in this Model button just here. If I click on it, it takes me to Floating Model Space within one of the Layout tabs. I can go back to Model Space there, like that. If I go to Layouts, like that, you'll see it's currently in Model. If I double-click outside the Viewport and deactivate, it goes to Paper. So, it's the Model-Paper Toggle. I'm going to click on the little fly-out here again and switch that off again, purely for spacing along the Status Bar so that I can read everything. Now, let's go back to the Model tab again here so that we're not working in any Layout tabs or Paper Space. Let's now have a look at drawing a line. So, I draw a line like so and I'm going to Specify the first point of my line as 100, 100 and press Enter. And now for ease of use I'm just going to drag along the Polar Tracking line like that, and so I pin, I want the line to be 200 units long, and Enter and Enter to close out the Line Command. Now, if I want to draw another line from either end of this line, I would go back to the Line Command here and I would hover using Object Snap over that Endpoint. Did you see the coordinate appear there on the Dynamic Input as I hovered? 100, 100. Read your Status Bar. The Coordinates are there at the bottom left-hand corner of the screen: 100, 100. If I wanted to draw a line from the other end, again it shows the Coordinates briefly on the Dynamic Input. For a more permanent readout, look at your Status Bar: 300, 100. So, you can actually calculate using Object Snap and your Coordinate readout what the coordinates of a point are. I would left-click there now, go from the Endpoint Snap and draw my line to my heart's content. So, as you can see the Status Bar is a good view of what is switched on, what is switched off; also, it gives you all the tools that you need to work within AutoCAD.