2013 Tips and Tricks Contest!

What could be better than a free book?
Five free books, a training video dvd and a 3D Mouse, of course!

It has been awhile since my first Tips and Tricks Contest:
Tips and Tricks Contest: Win a Great Book!
Mastering Civil 3D Winner Tips and Tricks
AutoCAD and LT Bible Winner Tips and Tricks
Check out those awesome tips readers shared!

Contest Rules: 

1. Post a cool tip using the comments area below or by sending me an email.
2. Tell me which prize you'd like to win.
3. Provide your email as outlined below, so that, if you win, I may contact you for your mailing address.
4. Contest is open until April 30th, 2013.

After the contest ends, I'll take all of the tips and blindly draw a winner for each prize.
The winner will be notified, then I will share all of the great tips users submitted.

Use the following as a guide to submit your tip:

Name: Melanie Perry
Email address: mistressofthedorkness@gmail.com
Prize:  AutoCAD Bible
*Attribution*: "Mistress of the Dorkness"
*Software Tip Applies To*: AutoCAD
*Tip*: Use the Express Tool "SYSVDLG" to access your system variables, and even save them as an SVF file to preserve or share your current settings.

*I'll only be publicly posting those fields marked with an asterisk, and of course, I'll only be using the email address you provide to contact you if you're the winner. If you submit your tips using the comments are below, those will not be posted, they're caught in my spam filter so I can see them, but, no one else can.

You can post tips and tricks for your favorite Autodesk software (any flavor) or, if you've got tips about other applications or hardware that make your workday easier, I'd be happy to share those, too.

Thank you to the companies and authors who have donated the prizes for this giveaway!

A. The AutoCAD and LT 2012 Bible by Ellen Finkelstein
B. Aubin Academy: Revit MEP 2013 by Paul Aubin, Darryl McClelland, Martin Schmid & Gregg Stanley
C. AutoCAD Civil 3D 2013 Essentials by Eric Chappell
D. AutoCAD 2010 - 2D Basico (Portuguese) by Luciana Klein
E. AutoCAD 2010 - 3D Basico (Portuguese) by Luciana Klein
F. Revit Architecture 2013 Essential Training DVD with Paul Aubin
G. 3DConnexion SpaceExplorer from Logitech
H. Revit Structure 2013 Essential Training DVD with Brian Myers

A list of BIM Standards

I wrote this post, Revit Standards - Getting Started Guides, back in 2009 when I incorporated Revit into my CAD Standards here at the hospital.

There is A LOT more information out there these days. I have been collecting things in a reference folder on my hard drive whenever I've come across them, but, I hadn't gone so far as to list them and share them with you.

Luckily, today I was looking for an answer to another question on the AUGI forums and ran across this post, BIM Standard and Example Sharing.

In that post, Marti shared this great table:
http://www.cad-addict.com/2013/02/list-of-existing-bim-standards.html


I have been continuing to collect this data myself since I still need to expand my Revit Standards (I don't control the process, but, I do need to control the documentation through the lifecycle, so it is not a BIM Standard for me so much as a long-term QC checklist of deliverables).
As only about 10% of my campus is currently modeled, I am still evaluating which things about existing models I can live with and which I'd like to change, that will be further affected by our current CMMS upgrade. We're currently undergoing a massive campus overhaul, tearing down buildings and putting new ones up, and they will all be turned over to us as models. I've been really impressed with our design team so far and am looking forward to making this big leap ahead which doesn't happen often in a Facility. We tend to move fairly slow, due to the massive scale of any initiative I choose to take on.

Enjoy the resources and feel free to share more, or your experiences and caveats.