Welcome to Knowledge City's Beginning AutoCAD class. My name is Kevin McWhorter and I'll be your instructor for this class, Introduction to AutoCAD. And we will be covering quite a bit of the AutoCAD environment. My background and what qualifies me to teach this course is I have 22 years of AutoCAD experience. And most of those years are in a training background. We're training professionals in all types of disciplines, civil, mechanical, electrical, architectural. I've done course curriculum design, technical support, and CAD projects in all of those applications. So a wide variety and several years of AutoCAD working with multiple versions of AutoCAD. This class will be conducted in AutoCAD 2010. And if you have an older version of AutoCAD it will work perfectly. The menuing system will be a little bit different. I will be taking a look within 2010 at the classic menu. So there's the old menu can be brought up in 2010 and used instead of the new ribbon-based Windows 2007 interface standards. So you have an option to use the older menu and all the commands that I'm going to do in this beginning class are in all the previous releases. There might be some very small subtle changes but anybody even back to release 14 could follow along with this class. The course description is covering topics that include drawing startup, a little bit of file management, opening and closing and saving files. The AutoCAD menuing system so that we understand how to interface and find any of the commands that we're looking for. The command input, how to input commands, we can type commands, we can pick them off tool palettes, so on. The draw commands will cover almost all the draw commands on how to draw objects within AutoCAD, modifying those objects, copy, move, rotate, scale and so on. There's quite a bit of power in the modify commands and we'll cover all of those. The text commands, how to input text, how to manage text, how to edit text, how to manage fonts and formatting of text within AutoCAD. That's also called text styles. Tatching, how to place filled-in patterns within your models. In CAD drafting and design, there's lots of patterns that need to be filled into certain areas for all the different disciplines that you work in. So we'll be covering hatching and then dimensioning. Once you draw a part or a house or an electronic component, oftentimes you need to put dimensions on it, calling out the sizes and lengths and so on, angles, diameters, radiuses of the various parts. So we'll cover dimensioning commands, how to place dimensions in the drawing and also how to manage your dimensions so that they look correct and the way you want to place them. We'll also introduce you to blocks, multiple creations, multiple creation of blocks and block library management. Basically, what blocks are in AutoCAD is repeatable items. Once you draw a chair, you can make a block out of it and then you can use it in any other drawing that you need after that. You never have to draw that particular block, that particular chair again. We'll also cover the inquiry commands, how to get information out of your drawing like distances, angles and also square footage or square inches depending on your model. How to output your drawings with the plot command and plotting to scale factors within AutoCAD and then also an introduction to paper space and model space. So it's a well-rounded, very good introduction to AutoCAD. My main goal for this class and for you is to get you up and drawing with AutoCAD as quickly as possible. To get familiar with the interface, get familiar with the AutoCAD environment and to be able to start to draw and modify and place text and dimensions and manage your drawings and get your work done. So that's the main goal. Now with our menuing system, using the ribbon band across the top of the screen as you see up here in 2010, there is a lot of panels that are available and since we are working and videoing this screen capture in a resolution of 800 by 600, the ribbon panels are going to be compressed on the video. You will see something a little bit different on your screen and these will be expanded so you can see all the buttons available within that panel. So since we're running a low resolution, my screen will look a little bit different than yours but I will open these panels as we need to work in that topic and I may close a couple as we need to. So that's the only difference visually from your screen to my screen.