hello my name is Randy Dobson I'm an instructor here in the Houston Texas area and this video will be covering the workspace and kind of general layout of AutoCAD so whenever you go to open up a AutoCAD drawing your screen will look something like this you've got recent documents over here that you can set up in different types of settings you've got your a 360 it's an online service that I'll leave that up to you if you want to investigate it I won't be teaching that in this course but your main part over here will be you can start a drawing from scratch templates which will be another video and then open files which is really just these recent files so I'm just gonna start a drawing and as you notice I started this drawing I already had a couple other ones open here so up here on top this shows all your active drawings very important to know that with AutoCAD you have your drawing area this right here this dark area will be your drawing area if you hit your f2 key function two key at the top you'll get your text box now if you have a laptop sometimes the f2 key at the top is maybe volume control or something you might have to hit a special key like a shift to get that function key to work but this right here whatever I type say I type units it I'm gonna go back to f2 it shows me my previous commands just a nice little reference if you need to look back at something up here on top or all your commands and different types of settings down here at the bottom you'll see some more settings that you can use this right here is your coordinates and you'll watch these numbers will move as I move my cursor and of course only the first two because that's X&Y the third one is Z again I'll have a video on coordinates I just want to get you used to the layout here down here at the bottom is your command line this is what's very unique with AutoCAD very few of any softwares have where you can actually type in commands this goes way way back to the beginning of all the cans the nice thing is I call this your lifeboat because if if you learn 20:18 but somebody sits you down and wants you to take a test in 2010 you may not be able to find it up here because it's all moved around but no matter what version if I need to draw a line I can just type in Li and E down here at the bottom and even if I can't remember how to spell a command say I'm chamfer I'll go CH I can just look for it here and say okay there's chamfer right there click on it and it starts to command again as a beginner this is where you're going to be looking for information as you go through a command it's going to prompt you that's why this is called the prompt and over here on the side your screen may look a little bit different because of which options I have turned on or settings if you go right here to customization anything that's checked is gonna show up now if I wanted to just come along here and check everything I'll just do a bunch of them here you're gonna have all these options if you don't know what these are there's no reason for to have them up okay so the first thing when you open up your screen just like I told my students in class when you go to jump in somebody's car to borrow it you're going to adjust the seat you're going to adjust the mirrors you're probably going to change the the radio station you might change the temperature air conditioner heater so you're gonna set it to the way that you want it this is what you have to do with AutoCAD so for this course will leave coordinates on grids snap dynamic input polar tracking all of this will go through we're not gonna do 3d we're not gonna do dynamic selection filtering all of these we're not gonna be going is so you notice all those are going away so now I've got what I know so that's how you would select those and for them to be active they have to be blue if I click on it you notice it got dark one thing also when you hover over it it will tell you something of what it is also on some of them like this one you will see an f8 this lets you know that you can hit your f8 key and I want you to watch this one right here I'm gonna hit the f8 key and it'll turn blue then it turns back to black okay those are function keys along the top of your screen where we originally hit f2 for the text screen you can turn things on and off these have been the same since I began back in the early nineties so those are the options to use so you have to input your commands down here or if you want to you know here I could type your line Li in E or there's hotkeys I can just hit L enter and it starts I would recommend that you go print out the hotkeys for 2018 and you'll see there's there's a lot of abbreviations if you want to type it in if not you can always come up here and type in line and your command is already started okay starting them up here or typing any command down here will start it you see something up here that says array like right here I can come down here and just type array and also right over here you have the dynamic input which I will be going over in another video this allows this command line to be up on the screen so instead of typing L and it being down here it's up here on the screen where I'm watching so these are the different options which one you use is up to you all these pull downs were not around a lot when I learned it so I learned to type it plus I'm ambidextrous so I can use both my hands the right one for the mouse and the left one for the typing but you pick the one that you want but know that this command line has always been there this is your lifeboat if you do it do an older version of AutoCAD you know even if it takes you a couple seconds to type in circle you can at least start the command when you look up here at these screens you'll see some commands or options that have little arrows these are fly outs all the CAD combined things together you know you open this up and rectangle or polygon fill it switch you will hear me call fillet because I am a fisherman fillet shares with chamfer extend extend shares with trim and then of course any of these down here draw these are extra draw commands here's some extra modify commands and so on so anytime you see these little arrows those are considered fly outs let's see also make sure that whenever you're done doing a command that you hit the escape button can see there's still information down here at the bottom that means I am still in the command to always make sure hit your escape button a couple times and now you see type of command this again will be where you could put in information or even if you're not you know that you can go to line if I do that and then I want to go to circle well I have to stop this command so I just hit escape I see this is all clear down here so now I could type circle and draw circle command I draw a circle and that concludes my video on the workspace thank you