Gold Support to the Rescue

How Autodesk Subscription Gold Support Can Save Your Day

Yesterday I wrote extensively about the benefits of getting your Autodesk software on subscription, except I left out one important benefit. I had a good reason, so bear with me.
The benefit I left out was that with subscription you can log your own support requests with Autodesk. One of their techs will research your problem and email you. This could save you a lot of money, compared to buying a support block with your reseller. That support block time can just fly by if you have an odd problem. I wanted to write about this now, because even though this is a terrific benefit, it's even better with Gold Support.

Once you log in to Subscription Center, you can look at the benefits I talked about yesterday, or create a support request. What I hate about creating a support request online is that you have to disable the pop-up blocker every time (because who wants to leave that off? You'd go nuts with all the pop-up ads all day long). In this picture I showed how I did it. You might have more than one, and you have to disable all of them. I know it's a little thing, but there are days I just don't need any little annoyances! How about you?

But once you get through that, there's a simple form to fill out.

At the top of this second picture notice that the kinds of things you can get help with are listed- installation, product configuration and troubleshooting.

You also have the choice to allow your reseller to see your support request, so if you're working closely with them, they can be kept in the loop. After you've submitted the form, they'll get back to you with a solution, or perhaps more questions about the problem. It's a great benefit to Subscription members.

The down side is, if you're stuck, you can't get any work done until they have time to get back to you...

So, that brings me to one of the awesome benefits of Gold Support - You can phone them! You can call an Autodesk Tech for one-on-one real-time help with your AutoCAD problem.
From 9 to 5 in each time zone during the regular work week, and even weekend hours in certain areas, you can call in with a toll-free number. What could be sweeter?

In normal Subscription, there are several levels of people who can log in to the Subscription Center for help. The Contract Manager sets this up. With Gold Support, you can have up to 4 people who can call for support! There's even an option for more. I love that.

Another sweet benefit of Gold Support is the ability to run several versions of your software on one machine. OK, there are conditions you have to meet, but it's worth it. I bet everyone has had problems working with old drawings in new versions, or getting files from someone who is using a different version of the software. Eliminating these daily headaches would be ideal.

I just remember the days of struggling on my own, trying to figure stuff out with AutoCAD. Gold Support would have saved me many a stressful day if I had had this way back when!

For any of you that might be translating this page, let me mention that online help is available in many languages, depending on where you live. This chart shows which regions have online support in what language.

Hidden Subscription Benefits

Many of you get your AutoCAD software through subscription, which means that you basically buy it for the full price the first time, and then every year you pay a much lower fee to get the next new version automatically sent to you. Even if you weren't in the habit of buying every new release, this is still a good bargain. But did you know how many other things you are entitled to by being on Autodesk Subscription? There's a lot with regular subscriptions, and with their new Gold Subscription program, there's even more.


You get to Subscription Center from the Autodesk home page, there's a link in the lower right corner. Once you've logged in, you can either create a Support Request, or access your subscription benefits. We'll save Support Requests for another day. The picture above is what the benefits page looks like.


Number 1 in my screen shot there is Product Downloads. These are very cool special tools that are only available to subscribers. There are a couple different ones for AutoCAD, as well as for most of the more specialized softwares like Map and Civil 3D.

Below is a partial list of the Product Downloads:


I think each of these could be a subject for a long article!




The next thing only available to Subscription members is on-line training. On my illustration, I labeled the two places you can get to these as 2. & 3.
I clicked on AutoCAD and took a look at the tutorials for the new 2009 features. They're good! If you can't get to an update class, this is really important stuff. I meet so many people who've never learned all the cool stuff that they add to AutoCAD every year, they just keep using the same tools. Usually when I show them the new stuff, they slap their foreheads and say "That would have saved me HOURS of work!" Seriously, they do!








So, to reduce forehead slapping and save yourself hours of work, take a look at these e-learning lessons.


Number four on my list is "Stoeckel on Subscription", which is a blog written by one of the experts of AutoCAD. Just to whet your appetite for checking this out, here's a bit of his introduction:



When you read a little of how long he's been working with AutoCAD and of all the things he's done, you'll be as glad as I am to read his blog.

You can learn a lot if you listen to smart people. He's one of them.


And I haven't even mentioned the extra benefits if you're a Gold Support member. More on that tomorrow!


Here's a link to the Glossary of all the subscription terms.

New Multileaders and Old Quickleaders

It's 3 in the afternoon and I just made a fresh pot of coffee, so I'm wide-awake and ready to roll through the rest of the day. This blog entry, like so many, comes from a problem one of our clients was having. Being the kind-hearted person that I am, I thought I'd be helpful to some unknown CAD operator out there and keep them from tearing their hair out in frustration. So here's my little tip about Leaders...

Last July, I wrote about the new Multileaders, one of the new features of 2008. I still think they're a huge improvement on the old Quickleaders, but there is a wrinkle I ought to have been aware of. When you use Multileaders, if the drawing is opened in an older version, the Multileaders become Proxy objects and might not be visible. ARRRGH!
So...
If you open it in AutoCAD 2007 and earlier versions, set PROXYSHOW to 1.
Here is a link to the official Autodesk solution - Take me to your Leader

This isn't exactly great news if you are collaborating on a project with someone who has 2007 (or even older!) AutoCAD products. What if they have to be able to edit these leader objects? You'll want to be able to insert the old style Quickleaders, right? I'm going to do a little review of how we create a custom toolbar using the Customizable User Interface, so we have a button for our leaders.
By the way, the old Quickleaders can be made to attach blocks, but that's a whole new subject.
For you real old-timers, excuse me, I mean for you very experienced CAD users - you can just type in QLEADER, and it will work like it used to. Quickleaders are visible and editable in older versions. If you're used to typing everything in anyhow, you can skip the rest of this entry. The rest is written for the new people who've just been learning this program, or for anyone who just doesn't feel comfy with the CUI.
Type in CUI, and you'll see the dialog box come up as in the picture here. For an example, I'll copy the dimension toolbar and customize it with the buttons I use the most, and add the Quickleader button on it.
First of all, expand the toolbars and find the Dimensions toolbar, right click on it and choose Copy. Then right-click on the Toolbar heading, and choose Paste. The 'copy of Dimensions' toolbar will show up at the bottom of the list. Click on it to choose it, and right-click to find "Rename". If you're sharp eyed, you'll notice that I forgot to do this step. Oh well...

When you click on the plus in front of the toolbar name, it opens up so you can see everything that is on there. To remove buttons that you seldom or never use, right-click (again with the right-clicking!) and choose 'Remove' from the list of options. It only removes the command from that toolbar, not anything else at all.

To find a command that you want to add to a toolbar, type in as much of the command as you know, and the commands that contain those letters will start being filtered in the list below it. The Quickleader command shows towards the bottom when I type in "leader". When you see the command you want, just drag it up onto the toolbar and place it where you want.

Now, whenever you make a new toolbar, it will appear in every workspace. The easiest way to get rid of it in workspaces where you don't want it is to stay in the CUI, click on each Workspace title in the upper left panel of the CUI, and notice that in the upper right panel you can see what toolbars, and ribbons, and so on, show up in that workspace. If you don't want this toolbar in your workspace full of ribbons, just right-click on it as I did in this illustration and remove it. It's easier to do it this way than to open each Workspace and delete it from there.

AND, you can just as easily add this or any other button to your existing ribbons, if you've become comfortable using them. You do all the steps as above, except you drag the command onto the proper Ribbon, and onto whichever row you want it to show up. Voilà! You just customized the new Ribbon, and it was a piece of cake!

Directions for the RegApp Cleanup Utility

Hello, this is part 2 of the RegApp Cleanup Utility.

I'm sure there must be at least one person who went to the link and downloaded the exe file, and now would like a little more help with this.

If you've never done this before, you might double click on the exe file and then wonder why nothing happens. So, here's what you have to do:
Once you download and run the .exe file (the one I sent you a link to in the last blog entry), it asks you where you want the files to be extracted. What it means is that the .exe file contains several files, and you need to tell it where to put them -so you can find them again- and then you'll have a few more steps to go through. So create a folder specifically for this.

According to the documentation, you need administrative privileges on your Windows operating system to install this, or get your administrator to do it for you. They love when we interrupt their day to ask them to do things like this.

If you have privileges, navigate to the folder and copy CleanupRegapp.exe, CleanupRegappRes.dll, and CleanupRegapp.html to the installation directory of your AutoCAD-based product. In my case, it was C:\Program Files\AutoCAD 2009

NOTE: To run this utility you must launch CleanupRegapp.exe from the installation directory of your AutoCAD-based product. Not from the folder you just made and into which you extracted everything.

To clean affected files:
1. Close all affected files. (Open affected files will not be cleaned!)
2. Launch the Regapp ID Cleanup Utility from the installation folder of your AutoCAD 2008 or AutoCAD 2009-based product.
If desired, in the Regapp ID Threshold field, enter a number to change the regapp ID threshold. Files that contain fewer regapp IDs than the threshold are not cleaned. The default regapp ID threshold is 50.
3. Under Files to Clean, select affected files. You can select individual files, folders, and subfolders.
To clean the contents of subfolders within a selected folder, select Include sub-folders.
To load and remove unreferenced regapp IDs from external references (xrefs) attached to the selected files, select Include Xref files.
4. Click OK. Cleaned files are saved in the same format last saved in.

One of the files you'll find, assuming you paid attention to what you named the folder, is CleanUpRegApp.html. This file gives you all the directions on how to install and use this Utility that I've shown you here.

NOTE: This utility cleans only DWG files saved in AutoCAD Release 14 and later file formats.
This utility makes cleaning up a bunch of drawings so much faster! In the previous blog entry, I told you how you could clean up one drawing at a time. This utility didn't even take 3 minutes to run. Imagine if I had had to open all 38 of these files and clean them up one by one! Using this utility, I could do this entire project in a fraction of the time. It's worth learning how to use it.

RegApp Cleanup Utitility

Hi again,
Have you ever gotten drawings from another company and they were enormous files for no discernible reason? Last week we had a client who was having strange problems with a whole lot of drawings. I enlisted the help of our Civil 3D instructor, Ken Martinez, and he showed me the difference between the typing in "purge" or "-purge" at the command line, as the only way to get rid of RegApps. You have a lot more control with "-purge".
Then just today, as a "Oh, by the way" comment today, Ken showed me this new Cleanup Utility on the Autodesk website, and I thought I ought to pass this along to you. I'm always looking for ways to eliminate headaches.

With this new Cleanup Utility, you can do a batch of drawings at once. Here's the link to the Autodesk page:
Excess Unreferenced RegApp IDs
RegApp Cleanup Utility

I did a little tiny bit of research, and found a good entry in the AUGI archives from 2006 that spells out better than I would how to use the purge command to get rid of invisible attached data from a drawing. It explains how it gets there and how to get rid of it. I copied the entry, (it's from 2006) and also credited the author. For cleaning up one or a few drawings, it's really easy.
From the AUGI website, in the Archives from 2006, is this tip on how to get rid of Xdata in a drawing. Written by Andy Manninen: (and I quote)

I would recommend to all AutoCAD users to run a -PURGE command, then select RegApps, * for all, and no to verify names. You may be surprised at what you will find... Regapps are added when you use certain software, and by implementing certain commands. If you purge these out you will find that your drawings will open much faster. I have not experienced any problems with purging the RegApps out because AutoCAD will generate these back as it needs them. With a clean drawing I have about 8 RegApps in my drawing. But I Have cleaned some that have around 157,000 RegApps. Cleaning that file, the size went from 3 MB to 400KB. The Main thing with RegApps in a drawing is that they act almost like a virus, if you xref in or insert an "infected" drawing, the RegApps propagate into the current drawing. That is why you need to make sure when you get files from an outside source you really should clean out the RegApps. The only way to clean these out without third party software is by using the "-PURGE" command on the command line, (not through PURGE) and you need to specify RegApps. (RegApps are NOT purged under the ALL).

AutoCAD 2009 Update #2

When I opened up my AutoCAD this morning, I had a little message pop up telling me that I had update information. I was pretty surprised, it seems like I just updated my software! But when I clicked on it, there it was, Update #2. I guess you could call these the Updates formerly known as Service Packs.
If you do not see a pop-up, the picture on the right shows you how to get new updates.

Here is the link to the "Read Me" file
In this link you will find important information about who should install this update and what it fixes, as well as instructions for its installation in network situations. All good info!
Here is the link to the Update for AutoCAD 2009.
Here is the link to the Update for AutoCAD LT 2009.
I copied a list of the things this service pack, oh I mean Update, will improve. I'm quoting from the Readme page.
Updates have been made in the following commands and features:
3DORBIT - Annotation Scaling - Blocks - HATCH - LAYER - MATERIALS - Menu Browser - OPEN/SAVE - PLOT - Properties Palette - PUBLISH - RENDER
I'm quite glad to read this, because I've had quite a few calls about some problems in these areas. Now I hope that just by installing this Update, those problems will just go away and leave us alone!
Below is a list I copied from the Read Me file of defects that have been fixed- I'm only including the ones specific to Update 2.
If you don't have time to read all this, just scrolling down to scan through the number of things this Update will fix should be enough to make you realize that it fixes an awful lot of problems!

And let's keep this in perspective - even though we all complain about software problems, Autodesk does always work hard to keep improving their software. Moreover, this update is free, and it fixes many problems. Don't you wish the banking system could just issue a patch and all these scary economic problems could be fixed too? Or that the 'patch' they're working on wasn't quite so expensive?

The following defects have also been fixed:
3D Navigation Tools:
When you use the ViewCube in some drawings, AutoCAD freezes.
.NET API :
If you create a wipeout object through .NET API, a fatal error may occur.
* Annotation Scaling:
The scale of annotative text changes when you use LISP entmod() to change the properties of the annotative text.
Attributes:
When a drawing contains xrefs, the -ATTEDIT command fails.
* Autodesk Buzzsaw:
In the File Navigation dialog box, when you use the Add a Buzzsaw location shortcut option, AutoCAD crashes.
* Blocks:
When you copy and paste a dynamic block, associative hatches do not work.
After you redefine a block definition, associative hatches in dynamic blocks display incorrectly.
When you open a drawing, a polyline in a block may have a very large width.
After you open a drawing, some dynamic blocks lose their dynamic properties.
* Data Extraction :
Data Extraction cannot finish operations in some cases.
The Data Extraction Combine Record Mode > Sum values option does not work correctly.
* DGN Support:
When you import some DGN files, AutoCAD crashes.
* DIM:
If alternate units is on and you edit dimension text, the alternate units text is duplicated.
* Export a Layout to Model Space:
If .NET 3.5 Service Pack 1 is installed and you use the EXPORTLAYOUT command on some layouts, AutoCAD may stop responding.
* Find:
The FIND command performs slowly when you search for text.
* Groups:
Rollover highlighting does not go away.
* Hatch:
When you bind a drawing with an xref that contains annotative hatches, AutoCAD crashes.
* Hide/Shade:
When you use the HIDE command with a drawing that contains text, some objects may not be hidden.
* Image:
When you attach a corrupted raster image to a drawing, AutoCAD crashes.
* Layer:
When you zoom to a locked viewport, the Layer palette updates
* Layouts:
When you attempt to switch layouts in drawings, an Out of Memory crash may occur.
* Materials:
When you import a 3DS file with texture, AutoCAD may crash.
* Menu/Toolbar:
Some menu macros do not work.
* Multileader (mleader):
Mleader custom arrowheads are not brought over to the drawing from the Tool palette.
* Multiline Text (mtext):
When you edit mtext in a viewport, it may be duplicated in other viewports.
* Object Snaps:
Osnaps on polylines and mesh objects do not work correctly.
* Plot:
When you plot upside-down, an OLE object does not plot correctly.
A drawing that contains hatches and gradients may plot slowly.
When plot area is set to View, AutoCAD LT may crash.
* Publish:
When you attempt to publish multiple sheets with PUBLISHCOLLATE=1, only the first sheet of the set is plotted.
* Quick Properties:
When you edit multiple mtext objects through the Quick Properties palette, AutoCAD crashes.
* Render:
When you render some drawings, AutoCAD runs out of memory.
* Ribbon:
If the ribbon is displayed and you select portions of a mtext object that contains multiple formats, the mtext object becomes distorted.
* Selection:
When you select objects in groups, AutoCAD may crash.
* Tables:
When you edit text with space before or after the text within a table cell, AutoCAD crashes.
* Text:
When you move text to a new position within a drawing, it disappears.
* Tool Palettes:
When you attempt to edit the properties of multiple Tool Palette tools, an Out of Memory crash may occur.

If you actually read through all these, you can understand why I only included the fixes for this second update. This is plenty long without including everything from service pack 1! There's a lot more important information on that readme page, so go take a look.

I sincerely hope that this update will really make your drawing time go better. And it didn't even cost 700 billion dollars!

AutoCAD 2009 View Cube

Have you ever felt like you were lost in space?

Autodesk really came up with a winner when they decided to add the View Cube in AutoCAD 2009! Any of you who've ever worked in three dimensional drawings know just what I mean. You're drawing and moving around and somehow you think you're looking from the top when actually you're underneath your drawing! (This has the potential to mess things up in spectacular ways)

With the new view cube, that won't happen anymore.
When you're in the 3D workspace, the button to turn on the Viewcube is on your home tab, in the View panel.

As you can see from the next few images, clicking on the various parts of the cube will change your view of the drawing to correspond with whatever part you picked.

Notice here I picked a corner of the cube

Here I picked one of the edges, on the side of the cube

Here I picked a face of the cube

Now watch what happens when I hit that arrow that only shows while I'm viewing the model from the side view, as you saw in the last picture. You can see from this picture how those arrows rotate your model.

And if you use 3D Orbit, the cube rotates with your model so you always know where you are. You just gotta love it.
This was so easy to explain, yet it saves sooooo much hassle when you're drawing in 3D. What an elegantly simple solution!