Memorize These Key-ins

If your AutoCAD based product is acting weird, knowing a few common troubleshooting tricks can mean the difference between hours of work and hours of frustration.

The following tricks will work for any AutoCAD based product such as AutoCAD Architecture, Civil 3D, AutoCAD LT, AutoCAD Mechanical and AutoCAD Electrical.

Trick 1:   FILEDIA

Filedia should be set to 1 for dialog boxes to appear.   Say you go to File > Open and are prompted for the file path along the command line.   This especially is the case after a recent crash.   Type FILEDIA at the command line and you’ll be back in business in no time.

 Trick 2: ALT Spacebar M

For some reason your layer manager is not appearing.  Autocad is not crashing - but it appears frozen until you hit the ESC key.   What really happening is that your layer manager dialog box is off in “lala land”.   To get it back, hit ALT and Spacebar at the same time.  Let go then type M.  You are now in a mode where you can relocate the dialog box with the arrow keys.    

Trick 3: AUDIT

This is another command line entry that basically tells Autocad “heal thyself!”  Follow the prompts and type Y to fix any detectable errors.  

I’ll post more tricks like these in the near future.  In the meantime, ENJOY!