Our collection of best AutoCAD tips and tricks

Over the years I have collected several AutoCAD tips that I am now sharing with you here.

These are tips, shortcuts and some workarounds that you can use to make your AutoCAD workflow super productive.

So, let’s begin with the simple tips first.

Basic Tips

These are some of the basic tips that every AutoCAD user should know.

Shift key override

When working in ortho mode your cursor will move in either vertical or horizontal direction.

To move it in any direction you can use polar tracking.

But if you want to work in ortho mode and only want to temporarily activate polar tracking then press and hold SHIFT key.

Now as long as your shift key is pressed the ortho mode will work like polar tracking and the opposite of this is also true.

You can also use shift key to remove objects from selection set.

So, if you have several objects selected and you want to remove any specific object from the set then press and hold shift key and then click on the object you want to remove from the selection.

Deactivating lasso selection

When you press and hold your mouse left click and then move it in the drawing area you get what we call a lasso selection.

This is a freehand kind of selection like the image down below.

If you don’t like this selection method then you can deactivate it completely.

To deactivate it type OP and press enter then go to “Selection” tab and deactivate the option “Allow press and drag for Lasso” as shown in the following image.

This will deactivate lasso selection and now you will have a regular window selection instead.

Selecting one vs several objects

When selecting multiple objects in AutoCAD you don’t need to press and hold the shift key like other windows tools.

But if for some reason selecting one object is deselecting the other object from your drawing then you can fix it using PICKADD system variable.

Type PICKADD on the command line and then press enter.