Michael's Corner is a monthly publication written by Michael E. Beall, Autodesk Authorized Author and peripatetic AutoCAD trainer. Michael travels all over the USA, bringing his fantastic experience and great understanding of AutoCAD to his clients. Michael's Corner brings together many of the tips, tricks and methods developed during these training sessions for the benefit of all users.
Michael's Corner provides something for every AutoCAD user. Every month, a number of articles cover a wide range of topics, suitable for users at all levels, including "The Basics" for those just starting out. Essentially, the aim of Michael's Corner is to help all AutoCAD users work smarter and faster.
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Regardless of the state of the world's economies these days, those of us on the CAD crews still have to be efficient and get the job done. In an effort to support those efforts, I thought I'd take a look at the Action Recorder which can really make repetitive tasks go quickly. I would love to hear how you are using this new A2009 feature, so send me a quick email on the series of commands you're automating.
In the remaining articles, we take a look at an extremely clever use for Alternate Units in a dimension (thank you, Alaska), as well as how to edit the cells in a Table (a question from one of our loyal readers). In the Basics section I am answering a question that typically comes up in training as I'm covering layer states, and that is how to edit a layer state if the layer condition of that state needs to be modified. This was a fun bunch of features to cover.
As always, if you want to be notified when Michael's Corner is posted, click the Subscribe button over on the left pane.
Wishing all of my fellow Americans a Happy Thanksgiving and may we always remain thankful for the many blessings the good Lord has bestowed upon each one of us.
DesignCenter has been a vital part of AutoCAD since A2000 and, unfortunately, enjoys relative anonymity among users. I'll introduce it here and show you a few additional features next time.

Using an interface similar to Windows Explorer, DesignCenter lets you navigate to any accessible drawing where you can view - and select - that drawing's named objects: Blocks, Dimstyles, Layers, Layouts, Linetypes, Tablestyles (A2005), Textstyles, and Xrefs.
Your drawings are 'in' DesignCenter by default. DesignCenter is essentially an enhanced Windows Explorer for AutoCAD drawings.
One way to effectively use DesignCenter is to access your favorite Dimension Style or Text Style for use in a drawing you just received from someone else.
Sidebar: A Template is what you need to begin a new drawing with your desired units, layers, linetypes, etc. loaded and ready to go. Please note that DesignCenter only displays .DWG files, not .DWT files. Therefore, begin a new drawing using your template, then save it as Master.dwg so it will be accessible in DesignCenter.
If you have a Master drawing containing your favorite named objects, use this method to copy the necessary elements into the current drawing.