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Written by Bob Mecham.   Do you find yourself needing to move only a part of a cell and your CAD Manager tells you not to drop any cells? Well here is a way to do both. Using the Stretch Elements command you can move elements within the cell.  In this example, I have a [...]

Written by Rod Wing.    The ByRef and ByVal keywords are used when passing variables to subroutines and functions. Passing arguments by reference (ByRef) passes the memory location of the variable which means that any changes made to the variable during the procedure are permanent. Passing arguments by value (ByVal) only passes a copy of [...]

Sometimes it is necessary to suspend the operation of your macro for a certain length of time. There is no native function to do this in VBA so we are left to our own devices. The Empty Loop Some of you may have tried the empty loop trick mimic a sleep function. This involves some [...]

Being able to read from and write to text files in VBA is useful for the import/export of coordinate data as well as other file and configuration parameters. Opening Files To work with a text file you will typically need to dimension three variables: A String variable for the file name     Dim txtFileName As [...]

Written by Bob Mecham.  Placing a North Arrow in a rotated view such as a plan and profile sheet can be done right the first time if you use AccuDraw and the shortcut keyins for compass rotation “T” for Top and “V” for View. One you have selected the north arrow cell to be placed [...]

Written by Bob Mecham.  There is a handy little key-in that will change the rectangular display of AccuDraw. Using the below key-in you can change the X Y readout to Northing and Easting. In the key-in browser type “accudraw settings northeast”       To change it back the key-in is “accudraw settings xy”   [...]

Efficient Array Looping VBA provides the LBound and UBound functions for retrieving the lower and upper bounds of an array.  When looping through an array many developers will conserve lines of code by putting the LBound and/or UBound functions in the loop test statement. This can decrease the performance of your application as these functions [...]

Written by Bob Mecham. To take the AccuDraw with Popup Calculator another step further than Complex Expressions. Popup Calculator has an added feature allowing the user to create a shortcut of commonly used values to a list.  As a default “pi” (3.141592653590) has already been added to the list as a custom value.         Viewing [...]

Written by Bob Mecham. To take the AccuDraw with Popup Calculator one step further I will show some of the uses of “=” function.  The popup calculator allows you to do complex expressions. You can include more than one operator and have the use of parentheses. For example when using AccuDraw to construct a 20” diameter pipe [...]

Written by Eric Gates. Are your Civil 3D pipes not smooth in your section views? Do they look more like diamonds then pipes? Here is a little gem that will smooth out this problem. The smoothness of the pipes in the section view is created using the Civil 3D variable Facetdev  (Facet Deviations) which is [...]