1 MIN 1 CAD: Nail 5 CAD Commands Beginning with N & O

Hi folks, we’ve already made it halfway through this series! Without further ado, let’s nail the following CAD commands beginning with N and O!

NEW

Creating a new drawing is a no-brainer: just click the icon on the document tabs. Nevertheless, the NEW command can help you open drawing templates, that is, DWT files much faster. In other words, you can easily access your customized settings like text styles, layer properties, and dimension styles. Steps:

1. Input [NEW] and press Enter.
2. Open a file from the Select Template File dialog box.

[su_spoiler title="Tip" open="yes" style="fancy" icon="chevron-circle"]These two system variables, FILEDIA and STARTUP, control the NEW command. When the value of FILEDIA is set to 1, dialog boxes can be invoked. Meanwhile, STARTUP determines which dialog box will appear—0 for the Select Template File dialog box and 1 for the New Drawing one.[/su_spoiler]

OLEOPEN

First, OLE stands for Object Linking and Embedding. It’s a convenient way for you to utilize the information generated from other OLE-supported programs in ZWCAD, just like enriching your PowerPoint slides with data from Excel spreadsheets. You can choose to link or embed the OLE objects.

Figure 1. If the “Link” option is not ticked, the OLE object will be embedded

Linking or embedding depends on whether or not you want the OLE object to be updated every time you edit the source file. Not surprisingly, the OLEOPEN command serves two ends—open the source file when the OLE object is linked or a new file containing it when it is embedded.

Figure 2. The difference between opening a linked OLE object and opening an embedded one

Let me show you how to open a linked source document using this command and save the changes to your DWG drawing. Steps:

1. Select an OLE object.
2. Input [OLEOPEN] and press Enter.
3. Make changes in the source file.
4. Select the part you want to display in the drawing.
5. Close the source file.

See? Changes in the source file correspondingly show in the drawing. And if your OLE object is embedded, just follow steps 1 and 2 to open a new file containing it. [su_spoiler title="Tip" open="yes" style="fancy" icon="chevron-circle"]Make sure the DBLCLKEDIT system variable is set to ON so that you can double click the linked OLE object to open the source file. This also applies to the editing of tables, texts, etc.[/su_spoiler]

OLESCALE

When it comes to creating tables and bills of materials in a drawing, OLE tables generated from an Excel spreadsheet are helpful. The trouble is: how to scale them precisely? OLESCALE is the command of choice! Steps:

1. Select the OLE object you want to scale.
2. Input [OLESCALE] and press Enter to invoke the OLE Text Size dialog box.
3. Choose the OLE font and point size to determine the datum text, according to which the whole OLE object will be scaled.
4. Specify the height value of the datum text to determine how it will be scaled and click “OK”.

Then, the whole OLE object will be scaled together with the datum text. [su_spoiler title="Tip" open="yes" style="fancy" icon="chevron-circle"]You can edit the OLE objects in ZWCAD only if they are linked to the drawing. If embedded, they can only be edited in the native OLE-supported programs.[/su_spoiler]

OOPS

“Oops, I did it again!” Nope, we’re not singing Britney’s hit song here. It’s just that you suddenly realized that you’d mistakenly erased some objects a while ago. So, how to restore them? Just type in what you’re thinking—OOPS. Step: Simply input [OO] and press Enter to restore the objects you deleted last time, that is, to undo the last deletion. The GIF below shows how to restore objects that were deleted with the ERASE and BLOCK commands using OOPS. Plus, like I just said, OOPS won’t affect the steps that are not for deleting objects, in this case, the line-stretching operations. [su_spoiler title="Tips" open="yes" style="fancy" icon="chevron-circle"]1. You can recover entities deleted by WBLOCK or BLOCK with OOPS without deleting the block definition. However, those erased by the PURGE command can’t be recovered by OOPS. 2. You can go back one step only with OOPS. For example, in the GIF below, I erased the palm tree and then the car, but I can only restore the car.[/su_spoiler]

OVERKILL

Since there are often many different 2D wireframes in CAD drawings, you can’t really avoid overlapping objects. To get a better plotting result, deleting the redundant parts or combining the overlapping ones with OVERKILL are never overkill. Speaking of turning lines and curves into one, do you remember JOIN? Steps:

1. Input [OVERKILL] and press Enter.
2. Select the duplicate or overlapping objects and press Enter to invoke the Delete Duplicate Objects dialog box.
3. Tick off the options in the dialog box according to your need.
4. Click “OK”.

Now, your drawing is much clearer! “N”o matter which CAD level you’re on, these CAD commands beginning with N and O can definitely help you reduce “o”vertime work. To keep “p”ace with the upcoming tutorials of this series, subscribe to our blog!