AutoCAD WS is now AutoCAD 360. The online/cloud version of AutoCAD has seen over 12 million downloads and 11+ million registered users since it was introduced. Starting today AutoCAD 360 will feature some new tools and some new purchase options. The modile app version is available for iOS and Android smartphones/tablets at no cost, but there are new "Pro" versions available. AutoCAD 360 Pro gives you 25GB of online storage, a maximum supported file size of 30MB, the ability to create a new drawing, plus more advanced drawing and editing tools. AutoCAD 360 Pro will cost you $4.99 per month, or $49.99 per year. If you need even more online storage (100GB) and the ability to work with larger drawings (40MB), AutoCAD 360 Pro Plus is available for $99.99 a year.

With AutoCAD WS currently installed, all you need to do is update the app and you will be ready to go with AutoCAD 360. I've included some screen shots of the free version below.

Check out AutoCAD 360 at www.autocad360.com and at the AutoCAD 360 Blog.

AutoCAD 2014 includes some new command line enhancements briefly covered in our launch time review titled AutoCAD 2014 in two minutes. Let's dive in and explore some of these new tools closer.

I am starting a list of known bugs in Civil 3D here. Some of these may be inherited through AutoCAD.

Many Autodesk products including AutoCAD and verticals such as Civil 3D include a proprietary shortcut bar in file selection dialogs, known as the Places List. It's the leftmost panel shown here.

Notice that the panel is light gray and the icon text is white, which makes the text difficult to read. Here is how to fix it.....

Today, March 29, is the 8th birthday of CAD Panacea. Inspired by Shaan Hurley, our first post was a simple tech tip back on March 29, 2005 on the old free Google blogspot system. Over the years we moved to our own domain, been through a few makeovers, and watched many other CAD blogs being born. Hopefully CAD Panacea has helped, informed, and provoked thought in many of you. Thanks to all of our readers over the years, especially those who leave feedback.

Autodesk announced the new line of 2014 branded products this week. Since 2008, CAD Panacea has brought you a quick summary of the new AutoCAD features and here is the rundown for AutoCAD 2014.

Fill out and complete a survey on AU for Autodesk, and you will be entered into a drawing for a free pass to AU2013.  Survey closes Friday, April 12, 2013. Good luck!

More details here.

Have you ever come across a block that you could not explode? You might try and get this message:

Command: explode
Select objects: 1 found
Select objects:
1 could not be exploded.
Command:

The ability to restrict blocks from being exploded was added many releases ago, but I still see a lot of users confused by this. Here is how to "fix it".

Have you ever wanted to run a script file on one or more drawings, without having to use the overhead of the entire AutoCAD application? Starting with AutoCAD 2013, you can. AutoCAD 2013 comes with a tiny application named AcCoreConsole.exe. (The AutoCAD Core Console). This is basically a stripped down version of the AutoCAD engine without the graphics screen.

There does not seem to be an option for changing text portions of dates (such as the name of the month) to UPPERCASE (or lowercase) using the Field command dialog box. All of the examples shown are in First capital.

However, if you explore other fields where there are options to change the case, you can see that setting a field to UPPERCASE simply adds some code to the end of the field like this: "%tc1".