hey everybody brandon here from cad intentions and in today's two minute tuesday i'm going to share with you guys some of my favorite tips and tricks when working with layers these tips and commands are going to save you time and make drafting a lot quicker in general if you guys like this video or any of the videos on the channel don't forget to check out my autocad fundamentals and workflows course it's available for instant download at the link up above as well as in the description down below both of those are discounted for viewers and subscribers like yourselves i think you guys are going to really enjoy it you'll get a lot out of the course and it's jam-packed with over a decade of tips tricks and experience in autocad all right let's jump right into today's video on layers and get started cheers [Music] all right so we're going to touch on a handful of different layer commands to help save you time and make it easier to work with layers today we're going to go through these pretty quick but i think you're going to get a lot out of them starting off the make current command or lay m current is a great way to quickly switch your current layer or the layer you are set to so you can see in this case i'm currently on the text layer if i select something like say these windows and choose make current you'll see that it has now unselected that object but my current layer is now windows this command is going to make it really easy for you to flip between layers depending on what you're drawing and working on maybe you want to start creating more windows so you want to quickly switch to the db windows layer by making it current now the next thing you can do is use the layer command down here which is change to current layer it's the one with the green check mark by choosing that it's going to let you choose another object say this bedroom text and it's going to instantly switch it to the current layer this is going to allow you to change a group or a single object to a new layer and that layer will be the current one you've got selected this can make it quick to change a ton of objects by selecting them all and then simply clicking this command and they're going to move to the current layer when i hit enter here you can see that the bedroom label here has been moved to that windows layer now going along with that we can use the match layer command up here that's lay mch for the command by clicking it it's going to let you choose an object so we're going to choose this bedroom carpet over here and hit enter and then it's going to ask us for a destination layer so this is going to match this object to whichever object we chooses layer so in our case we're going to select this bedroom label over here which we know is on the window layer and you can see it's changed it right away maybe we want to change those back to the text layer so we'll use match layer we're going to select both of these pieces of text and hit enter and then we're going to choose this piece of text down here which is on the text layer now all three of these are back on our default text layer with just a couple quick clips clicks and we don't need to scroll or look through a layer list to do this next up in the case where you have multiple layers that are kind of showing the same thing and you want to consolidate them into a single layer or say you're cleaning up a drawing after binding or inserting an xref and we've got multiple duplicate layers by accident the layer merge or lay merge command which is under this layers fly out here and right here in the right it's called l-a-l-y-m-r-g for the text command choosing it is going to allow us to choose an object on a layer that you would like to merge or combine with another layer so you can see here when we choose this text here it's on the text layer but if we choose this black text down here it's on the text two layer we don't need two text layers in this case so we're gonna merge the two into one we're gonna click the merge button down here we're going to choose the text 2 layer and you can see that it has selected all of the objects on this layer now this is something to be aware of when you do this merge it's going to delete or remove the old layer so the text 2 layer and move all of the objects onto the new layer which is going to be the text layer now when we've selected the layers that we would like to merge you could do more than one we're going to hit enter and it's going to ask us for our target layer for us that is this white text layer up here so we're going to select it it's going to confirm down at the bottom because this is a big step if you have tons or hundreds of objects it's going to move all of them at once and delete that layer which you may or may not actually want to do so to be sure that you want to do this it confirms it with you typing y or clicking the yes and hitting enter is going to confirm you can see that all these objects are now on that text layer and if we hit the drop down the text to layer no longer exists all right so next up we've got the layer walk command now i like to use this command occasionally to see what layers are kind of set up and what's on what layer on a new project or new design that maybe i haven't worked with there's a lot of reasons you could be using this but i find this just a quick way to walk or flip through all of the layers in your drawing so you can see when by hitting the down arrow or by selecting a layer it displays all of the objects on that layer you can use the control key to select multiple layers so let's select say walls doors and windows by holding control and selecting those three it lets you kind of step or walk through each of the layers in the drawing clearly and quickly finding out what's on each one again this can be super useful on a new project or if you're just looking to clean things up and you're not sure why you have this text data one layer there's nothing on it so you can remove it pretty quickly by hitting close this is going to restore all of your layers back to the way they were showing everything that was previously displayed all right so the last kind of layer command or tip that i want to share with you guys today is called copy objects to new layer and kind of as it's described it's going to copy any of these objects onto a new layer as well as copying the object so you're not going to affect the original object you're going to get a copy of it and it'll be placed on any layer you would like so to get to that we're going to hit this layers fly out here and you're going to choose the button with the little like star explosion and two layers by choosing that it's going to ask you which object you'd like to copy in our case let's say we want to copy this door here but we'd like it to be on the window layer so we've selected our door hit enter and you want to choose the destination layer we're going to choose our door or our windows layer for our door and now it's asking for a base point this is where the copy function comes in it makes it super quick and easy to duplicate objects while putting them on new layers so you can see here now anywhere i click is going to place a new door object but it's on a layer of our choosing which was the windows layer now i hope you guys learned something from one of these tips today these are going to definitely help speed up your drafting process and give you a little bit more information when it comes to what you can do and not do with layers i hope you guys enjoyed don't forget to subscribe to the channel down below if you haven't to stay up to date with all the new videos and if you are interested in learning more autocad fundamentals and workflows along with a ton of tips and tricks over a decade of my experience packed into a few hours of video courses check that out at the link up above and down below that's my autocad fundamentals and workflows course thanks for watching have a good one and cheers thanks for watching the video hope you guys enjoyed it uh be sure to check out my last video right here uh and don't forget to subscribe up here to make sure you're up to date and you see all my new videos thanks again cheers