Here’s a tip to speed up the work when you have to place items at a set distance apart along a curved line (polyline or spline). Use the Divide or Measure command to place points along a selected line. Divide places a specified number of points along the line.

Caption: Here we used the Divide command to place 14 points along this spline.
Measure places points at a specified interval.

Caption: The Measure command placed these points 10 units apart along the spline.

In AutoCAD 2008 and 2009, you can use the Data Extraction wizard to export AutoCAD data to an Excel spreadsheet. When you use the wizard to create an XLS or XLSX file, however, all of the exported data in the spreadsheet that results is preceded by a single apostrophe (').

The workaround is to create a CSV file instead. You can open the CSV file in Excel, and it won’t have the pesky apostrophes.

You can share custom tool palette groups with different computers by exporting and importing XPG files. This can get tedious when you want to standardize multiple computers on the same set of tool palettes. A quicker option is to copy and paste the file where the tool palette groups are stored: profile.aws. That file resides in the following locations, depending on your version of AutoCAD.

Copy the profile.aws file that contains the palettes you want to propagate to a server location or disk. On the destination computers, save the profile.aws file over the existing file. When AutoCAD starts on those computers, the tool palette groups will be available, assuming the default Unnamed Profile hasn’t been changed. On computers where AutoCAD uses a custom profile will need to overwrite the profile.aws file that resides in the custom profile folder, also found in the \Support\Profiles directory.

Note that though the palette groups are now available on the destination computers, you may need to specify the file path to the tool palette files. Select Options from the Tools menu, then adjust the settings in the Files tab.

AutoCAD 2008 introduced the Dimspace command, a handy tool to keep your dimensions looking neat and tidy. You no longer need to manually even out the spacing on baseline dimensions.

Caption: Untidy dimensions were plopped down randomly.

Once you’ve created some unsightly linear or angular dimensions, start the Dimspace command by typing Dimspace at the command line. AutoCAD prompts you to Select base dimension. Select the dimension line closest to the part in most cases. Next, AutoCAD asks you to Select dimensions to space. Select the remaining dimensions you want to evenly space. Finally, you are prompted to enter a value for the specific distance you want them spaced. Press Enter for the default Auto option, in which AutoCAD figures out the proper spacing for you. It does this by multiplying the text height of the base dimension by two.

Caption: Dimspace tidies up the dimensions by standardizing the spacing.
A neat trick with Dimspace is its ability to align linear and angular dimensions on the same horizontal line when you enter a spacing value of zero (0). This can be helpful when continued dimensions are moved so they no longer line up. 

Fields do not update when used in mtext within a block. The workaround is to insert the field into a block attribute.