AutoCad 2000 Review

Despite strong competition, Autodesk's AutoCAD remains the world standard for high-end computer drafting. This alone makes the introduction of a new version noteworthy, but is AutoCAD 2000 ($3,750 list) an important advance? If your goal is to increase productivity, then you'll want to upgrade--because this release isn't just new, it's significantly better.

Improving the interface between what is essentially a graphics task and the keyboard is always a challenge, one which even graphics tablets can only partially meet. To be productive, you need software oriented not to the keyboard but to the drawing, and the latest release of AutoCAD is a major effort to improve the interface through Autodesk's heads-up design.

To start, the new design offers more drawing tools and options available from context-sensitive menus, full support for the Microsoft IntelliMouse, and an active right-click menu that works as it does in Microsoft Windows. Among the hundreds of changes and enhancements in this version, the most critical ones speed AutoCAD's most common jobs and automate routine tasks.

New Features
Multiple Design Interface (MDI) is Autodesk's name for the new ability to view multiple drawings in the same session, which lets you move objects between drawings using a simple drag-and-drop operation. MDI is an important advance but is long overdue. (Here, Autodesk is catching up with far less expensive programs such as Visio Corp.'s IntelliCAD98.)

AutoCAD 2000's DesignCenter is an even more powerful productivity tool. Like MDI, DesignCenter provides a way to move objects between drawings. But it goes much further by letting you search for and copy design elements such as blocks, layers, and xrefs (external references) from a local PC, over a network, or even from Internet locations.

The Object Properties Manager (OPM) takes about 40 commands and dialog boxes that designers would have to access separately in AutoCAD Release 14 and puts them on one form, where you can modify nearly any object property and quickly edit dimension properties. The Drawing Properties dialog box lets you embed comments, author name, title, and subject name in a hidden attachment, which can be seen either within AutoCAD or via the Windows Explorer Properties tool. Drawing Properties entries can be searched for in the DesignCenter, making it easy to locate and reuse old drawings.

Saving Time And Work
CAD files can be very large, and users almost always work with small pieces of larger drawings. New to AutoCAD 2000 is the ability to load only a prenamed piece of a much larger drawing, which can save a lot of time. Also new is 3DOrbit, which provides real-time viewing and editing of wireframe or rendered 3-D models from any angle--even on slower computers.

Adding consistent-style text labels to all the elements in a drawing is vital but time consuming; a new global find-and-replace tool makes this task easier. Symbols can now have names up to 255 characters long--a useful change; the previous limit of 31 characters made it difficult to give meaningful names to the thousands of different symbols found in big projects.

For Advanced Users
Publishing a drawing often means plotting; for this function, AutoCAD 2000 updated the Heidi Device Interface (HDI) introduced with Release 14. Among other things, you can now store plot settings right in the drawing file. Plotting will require more relearning than any other change, because none of the old ADI plot drivers are supported, and the plot dialog box is all new.

The VisualLISP integrated design environment can customize nearly everything from toolbars to individual objects. You can now apply line weight directly to objects or layers instead of mapping colors to pens at plot time. You can also combine multiple files in a single file with multiple layouts and even reproduce drawings in 24-bit true color.

Full documentation is online, and you'll receive a separate Learning Assistance CD. The only print documentation included is the installation guide, the 900-page user's guide, a digitizer tablet template, and a quick reference card. The AutoCAD 2000 documentation pack, with print versions of all manuals, costs $49.50.

The most important changes, from a productivity standpoint, in AutoCAD 2000 are the ease of locating and reusing the content of other drawings and the improved interface for modifying object properties. These alone make the new version of AutoCAD worth the upgrade price. For new buyers the decision isn't as clear cut. AutoCAD 2000 is the world class of CAD, but a low-end package might meet your needs as well.