Dedicated Registered AutoCAD Workers
Users Group - Fort Wayne, IN area

2000 Meeting Highlights

December | November |  October

Previous Years Highlights
2004 | 2003 | 2002 | 2001 | 2000

December 14, 2000

There was no official meeting in the month of December, but a number of us went down to the iDesign meeting in Indianapolis. What a drive! Getting there was quite an adventure in itself. We saw a couple dozen cars and almost a dozen semis off in the ditch. There were a number of sessions on Architectural Desktop, Mechanical Desktop, Inventor, Map, AutoCAD, and AutoCAD Mechanical. There were a number of dealers for all over Indiana and a number of Autodesk employees to answer questions.

The highlight of the day was Lynn Allen, Autodesk's Technical Evangelist. Lynn was very funny and at the same time shared some great tips, tricks and new features of AutoCAD 2000i. Ask us how to keep folks from talking on their cell phones in a conference! We will share some of the highlights at January's meeting.

November 8, 2000

This was one of our better turn outs in a while allowing more input and greater discussion. We handed out more copies of Volo View and SW Lite hardware generation software.

Dave Schoeff demonstrated Netmeeting and other new Internet tools of AutoCAD 2000i. Using Netmeeting we were able to have one person "take control" of a second persons computer via the Internet. This would be a great tool for trouble shooting or conveying ideas via the Internet. Dave was also able to create an e-mail that already had the drawing attached (as a dwt file) and subject completed from within AutoCAD 2000i. 

In light of the LARGE file sizes of updates for AutoCAD, Mechanical Desktop, and Windows; we looked at some tools available on the web like Go Zilla, Zip Zilla, Download Wonder, and Download Manager which allow better odds of getting that huge file safely to your own machine. Can you believe Microsoft really expects us to down load an 85 Mb patch via a 28.8Kbps modem? Most of these routines may be found at zdnet.com.

In Mechanical Desktop 5, Allen Gager showed us that individual features could be colored. Dennis Jeffrey showed us how useful the new "next" option was when doing revolves and extrudes to create features. We also looked at using AutoCAD dimensions in a drawing prior to creating the sketch and having those dimensions become parametric dimensions.

Idesign and Autodesk University were also discussed. At least three of our number will be representing the DRAW Users Group this year in Las Vegas. We hope to bring you back all kinds of useful tips.

Unfortunately we only had three attendees at this meeting, limiting our planned coverage of topics.

We briefly covered Microsoft's Netmeeting and distributed copies of SW Lite hardware generation software.

A few of the tips of the evening were to used the shift key to deselect geometry from the current select list instead of using R for remove.

In Mechanical Desktop we noted that to move parts in the browser, the shift key needed to be held while dragging the part. We also went through the creation of standard parts using power pack.

Some time was spent using the Internet and working on more effective searches.