Tip for Week 2/27/06

 
Ever need to change a lot of text entities in your drawing to read a new value?  Maybe you have multiple text strings that have last years date shown and you want to update all of them to the current date. 

A simple way to do this is to use the FIND command.  The FIND command will let you find any text string in your file and replace it with a new entry.  This can be done individually or as a group.  Enter FIND and type in your search criteria.  Fill in the "Replace with" area and choose the button which best fits your needs.  A very cool option here is the "Zoom to" button which will allow you to preview all the instances of your search string if need be.

Unfortunately, the tool will not work for text that resides within a block definition, maybe in the next version of AutoCAD we'll have a more thorough utility to scan everything in your drawings.