Create Your Own AutoCAD Tutorial Library

Are you or do you have a staff member in your office who likes to create tutorial content?  Or maybe you simply have some web links to which you’d like to regularly refer.  Maybe you’d like to share these tutorials with the rest of your AutoCAD team.  Sure you can tell them where the videos, documents, or web links are, but the users must open them outside of the AutoCAD environment.

What if the users could access this content right within AutoCAD?  The closer the help is to the user, the better, I always say.  Consider creating a custom tool palette containing buttons to open these tutorials, and sharing it with the users.

I’ll go on the assumption you already know how to create and share a tool palette.  I’ll show you how to create tools that link to files or web links.

Create the Tool

Drag a line or a text object to your new tool palette then edit its properties.

Web Link

Edit 5 properties:

• Name.
• Description.
• Specify Image.
• Turn off the flyout option
• Edit the Command String.  Enter this information ^C^C_browser https://WebLink  Paste the link after browser.

File

The only difference between this tool and the web link is the Command string which uses a little LISP code.  Enter the path to your file after findfile, within the quotes.  DO NOT use back slashes, only forward slashes.

• ^C^C (startapp “explorer.exe” (findfile “C:/temp/1.docx”))

That’s it.  Make it easy for your users to get the help they need!