SOFTWARE
Shawn Gilmour, AutoCAD product line manager with Autodesk, was in Toronto in January to preview the latest version of the CAD giant’s software.
Gilmour, a graduate in mechanical engineering from Durham University in Oshawa, Ontario, has been associated with Autodesk for 20 years. For the last five years, he has lived in California directing the development of AutoCAD.
He said that the main purpose of AutoCAD 2005 is to make it easier for designers to organize their drawings into sets. Product research had found customers complaining that they spent too much time in CAD trying to find a document, so the new version hopes to remedy that situation.
The new Sheet Set Manager in AutoCAD 2005 allows the user to list drawing sheets in one place. Instead of searching through a project directory to find drawings and then plotting them out one at a time, the sheet set manager organizes them in a tree structure. The sets and subsets can be defined by company or project, and they can be standardized.
Publishing the entire drawing set can be done with one click, and the user can carry on working while they print.
Another timewaster that AutoCAD 2005 tackles is creating tables. Users say they spend more time creating tables than on drawings, said Gilmour. Instead of doing this job manually, the new program creates tables in a way similar to how they are made in Microsoft Word and Excel.
Title blocks are completed automatically on a set of drawings in AutoCAD 2005. Other features include automatic sheet numbering and detail labelling, and the ability to create layout views automatically. Visit www.autodesk.com
