2
Le Tour de AutoCAD 2012
In This Chapter
- Touring the AutoCAD 2012 screens
- Browsing AutoCAD's menus
- Going bar hopping: title bars, the menu bar, toolbars, and the status bar
- Unraveling the Ribbon
- Navigating with Bar and Cube
- Practicing with palettes
- Discovering the drawing area
- Using online help
AutoCAD 2012 is a full-fledged and thoroughly up-to-date member of the Windows world, but if your last kick at the software was AutoCAD 2008, or you're using Windows XP, or you've yet to kick the tires of the Microsoft Office 2007 suite, you may not recognize much in AutoCAD's newest release. But the title bar says “AutoCAD 2012,” so you must be in the right place!
Like the rest of the book, this chapter is written for someone who has used other Windows programs but has little or no experience with AutoCAD. If you are experienced with recent releases of AutoCAD, some of this chapter may be old hat (even if it does look different). Here and throughout the rest of the book, I show you how to do things using AutoCAD's implementation of Microsoft's Fluent User Interface (or FUI for short). In the “Going for that classic look” sidebar later in this chapter, I show you how to make the new version look a lot like an old one.
By default, AutoCAD 2012 opens in the Drafting & Annotation workspace, and will continue to do so until you make another workspace current. (I explain workspaces in the ...
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