AutoCAD 2016: Quickly Start a new drawing with Design Center

By Justin Doughty 

When we need to quickly produce a new drawing in AutoCAD, the majority of the time we will copy and paste elements from several existing drawings into a new file. While this is a perfectly acceptable method, you may waste a lot of time, switching back and forth between drawings, opening the wrong drawing, browsing for and selecting the correct elements you need. The quicker way would be to use the AutoCAD Design Center.

The Design Center is accessed by going to the View Tab> Palettes> Design Center or enter ADCENTER into the command line. Here you can quickly browse for existing content in other drawings and populate your current drawing with these items. You can right click and add items, or even drag a drop them into your drawing.

The example below show how you can quickly copy an entire layout from an existing layout to a new drawing.

The next example shows how you can quickly drag and drop a block into a new drawing.

Design Center is also a quick way to update or “redefine” an existing block. The below example shows an updated block with an image, in the old drawing, simply launch Design Center, Right Click the new block and redefine only.

Even if we don’t want to use Design Center all of the time, we can even create tool palettes, by right clicking a selection of blocks: