After spending countless hours in front of AutoCAD working on a project, you’re bound to have your own set of favorite commands to standardize a few steps. We also bet that you don’t have them all memorized or often forget them. To help you remember, we've made a list of 50 commands that can help you speed up your work game, discover new shortcuts, or come in use as a handy tool for when you forget what the command you need is called.
The following listing was developed and corroborated by our team for the 2013, 2014 and 2015 versions of
AutoCAD in English. We also prepared a series of GIFs to visualize some of the trickier ones.
When you’ve finished reading, we would love to know what your favorite commands are (including those that we didn’t include). We will use your input to help us update the article!
APPLOAD
Defines which applications to load when starting / opening AutoCAD. Very useful if AutoCAD and your computer don’t get along so well.
AREA
Calculates the area and perimeter of a defined object or a surface that you select vertex by vertex, according to the metric units defined in settings.
BACKGROUND
Choose a background image for the work area. It can be a single color (Solid), a gradual color (Gradient) or an image (Image) from your computer.
BMPOUT
Generates a bitmap image (.bmp format) after selecting a series of objects, surfaces, or regions.
BOX
Creates a 3D box, defining height, width and depth.
BURST
Explodes a block or an object, but keeps its attributes intact after exploding it. Highly recommended.
CHSPACE
Moves objects from the layout to the model, and vice versa. The best part is that the objects are scaled automatically in the new space.