AutoCAD Mechanical 2009: Enhancements to increase your productivity

By Mark Lautenbach,
MCAD Solutions Engineer
Hagerman & Company
Schaumburg, IL

Now is the time to think about adopting AutoCAD Mechanical for your CAD application. The new release of AutoCAD Mechanical is more powerful and even easier to use than ever. Read on to see some of the new benefits of using AutoCAD Mechanical 2009 and how the mechanical CAD experience will be more productive.

One of the biggest issues that users had about moving to AutoCAD Mechanical has always been how different it is compared to good old AutoCAD. In the new version of AutoCAD Mechanical, that large appearance gap has begun to go away. Now the pull down menus in AutoCAD and AutoCAD Mechanical are the same.

Not only are the menus the same, but you will also experience the same enhancements to the help system that AutoCAD has. Things like: Progressive tool Tips and expanded help by pressing F1 while a tool tip is active.

The Info Center on the title bar of the program gives the user quick access to do a search for help. This search will look through all sections of the help system that the software has. It searches the AutoCAD, AutoCAD Mechanical, and Autodesk Online to find information about any keyword or phrase that the user enters into the bar.

That is only the beginning of ways to make it easier to switch from AutoCAD to AutoCAD Mechanical. For those users that are already using AutoCAD Mechanical, there are some enhancements that should make using the software even easier.

AutoCAD Mechanical has a library of standard parts. This library contains over 700,000 parts from many different International standards. These standards now include the GOST standard. With this large quantity of parts, the new favorites section will make it easier to access the parts that the user needs on a regular basis.

Object property settings are now changed in a new dialog box that is user friendly and understood easily. The dialog has filters for the different object types and a nice preview that shows examples of how things will look as the settings are changed.

All AutoCAD and AutoCAD Mechanical layers are now manipulated in one common management tool. This tool allows you to convert an AutoCAD layer to an AutoCAD Mechanical layer. This new tool is similar to the AutoCAD Layer Management tool that users are familiar with.

Another big enhancement is with the Hide Situation tools. Prior versions of AutoCAD Mechanical had two tools for creating Hide Situations. In AutoCAD Mechanical 2009 the AMSHIDE tool works in all situations. This makes it simpler by not having to remember whether you need to use the AMS2DHIDE or AMSHIDE.

This has only been a small selection of enhancements that are inside of the new AutoCAD Mechanical 2009. For more in depth look at AutoCAD Mechanical, download the Technical What’s New or take a look at the top 10 reasons to move from AutoCAD to AutoCAD Mechanical documents from Autodesk. Or for a closer look at the software, contact your Hagerman & Company, Inc. sales representative today.