AutoCAD

5 Ways AutoCAD WS Makes You Look Good at Work

Feb 04

Whether you’re an engineer or consultant, an architect or a product designer, AutoCAD WS can significantly improve the way you do business. There’s nothing more annoying than going into a meeting and asking the other participants to hold down the corners of your giant print out.

Here are our top five ways that AutoCAD WS makes your working life better.

1. AutoCAD WS makes your Designs look Better

Turn up to your meeting with an iPad with your DWG drawing already open and everyone will lean forward to watch you show off your design. Making changes or responding to suggestions on the fly using your fingertips makes you look responsive and flexible. Your drawings will always look sharp in AutoCAD WS wherever you access them and anyone can join in and make suggestion even if they have never used AutoCAD before.

2. AutoCAD WS makes you Green

Think of all the paper you save by not printing multiple versions of every version of every drawing. AutoCAD WS helps you manage your design’s versions without the need for drawers and filing cabinets filled to bursting with sheets and sheets of old diagrams. Show your colleagues and clients that you are serious about your commitment to the environment.

3. AutoCAD WS makes you Available

It doesn’t matter where you are when your client calls you with questions. As long as you have AutoCAD WS installed on your mobile device you can call up your plans and address all questions and concerns. You can even make changes and add markups. When you’re out of the office, you can always access old drawings and use them as references for your current project spontaneously.

4. AutoCAD WS makes you Collaborative

Using AutoCAD WS you can share your work with anyone who needs to see it. They don’t need to be registered users of AutoCAD WS. All they need is a web browser. It’s so much more elegant sending a link once than sending a heavy email full of attachments.

You control permissions deciding when they can see it and whether or not they can make changes or even download it. You can invite people to join you in an online meeting where you can work together in real-time. At the end of the meeting all participants will receive a full meeting summary detailing all the changes that were decided.

5. AutoCAD makes you… ?

I’m leaving this one blank for you to fill in. If you work with AutoCAD WS, tell us why. The best reason will be added as the definitive fifth way that AutoCAD WS makes you look good at work.

AutoCAD Facebook Fans and their Mobiles

Feb 01

A couple of days ago, we asked our AutoCAD Facebook fans which mobile platform they have and what kind of device they’d like to use for viewing, editing, and sharing drawings. Well, the results are in, and it’s clear our users are freeing themselves from their desktops and are interested in mobile CAD. If you haven’t downloaded AutoCAD WS mobile app for iOS devices yet, give it whirl.

Platform Showdown – Android Hot on the Heels of iPhone and iPad

Although Apple devices still represent the majority of responses (41%), Android is proving quite popular, with 36% of respondents commenting that Android devices – tablet or smart phone – was either what they already owned, or wanted to use. Windows devices came in a distant third, with 7% of the vote. And of course, there were a couple of old-school folks out there too who still want to use pencil and paper. Looks like the napkin sketch won’t go away just yet.

Smartphone vs. Tablet

Tablets are newer to the scene, and offer clear benefits for DWG file viewing with the extra screen real-estate. That said, as smart phones travel everywhere with us these days, they still have the lead—with iPhone being the most popular with our fans.

Here’s the surprise of the survey – almost 5% of the folks who commented were interested in the idea of a dedicated AutoCAD tablet designed specifically for our customers. A dedicated device that simplifies all the steps of your work, incorporates BIM functions, and takes advantage of the GPS and camera features of the mobile device. Interesting indeed…

Using a Laptop? Get AutoCAD WS Web App on Google Chrome Store

No matter what mobile device you have, you can start using the web browser version of AutoCAD WS with your laptop today. It’s available at www.autocadws.com (hey, that’s right here), and we just published our free AutoCAD WS app to the Google Chrome Store too.

We always like to hear from our customers about what they want to see in our products. If you’d like to contribute more feedback to AutoCAD WS product development, email us: feedback@autocadws.com.

Right Click in AutoCAD WS

Jan 27

We have posted recently here and here about the possibility of adding a command line to future releases of AutoCAD WS. It was very clear that some AutoCAD users prefer to use their keyboards.

But today’s post is about a another type of user. This is for users who are more comfortable doing everything with their mouse. If you’re the kind of person who like to do everything with a mouse, then you should know what happens in AutoCAD WS when you right-click your mouse.

There are two different contextual menus available when you right-click depending on whether you are in the Drawings directory or you are working on an open drawing.

Right-click in Drawings directory

The menu selections here are very straightforward and deal with file management for your online account in AutoCAD WS.

Using the mouse you can select multiple files and then right-click and click Open selected to open each drawing at the same time in a separate tab.

Share selected will open the share permissions just like clicking the share button. Again you can do this for one or multiple drawings at the same time.

Remove shares will cancel all the share permissions you have allocated to the selected drawing or drawings.

You can use Cut, Copy and Paste selected to manage your files and move them to different folders.

Currently the only way to permanently delete a file from your online account is either by clicking the Delete button or by right-clicking and selecting Delete selected.

Rename selected allows you to rename files in your AutoCAD WS online account.

Right-click within a drawing

The top two commands in this menu will change according to the last act you carried out in the drawing. So you can Repeat or Undo a Move, Line, Rotate, etc.

Where applicable, Redo Last Command will be available as well.

You can use Zoom Window to focus on a particular part of the drawing. Selecting Zoom Window allows you to identify two opposite corners of a rectangle. The drawing will then automatically resize itself in your window to focus on the area bounded by your rectangle.

Zoom Extents will resize the entire drawing so that it all fits within your browser window. From here you can start over and zoom in again on the part of the drawing you want to work on.

Do you right-click in AutoCAD WS? Let us know what commands are missing from these menus in the comment section.