CAD/BIM Tips & Tricks

How to Get MicroStation to Use Your Microsoft Word Dictionary Don’t you hate it when you have to keep adding words to your MicroStation dictionary that you’ve already added to your Microsoft Word dictionary? Rick Sewell, Axiom Director of Customer Services, has been helping CAD users with their MicroStation problems for over a decade. Here…

Rick Sewell, Axiom Director of Customer Services, has been helping CAD users with their MicroStation problems for over a decade. Ever have one of those super busy days where you’re being pulled in multiple directions by umpteen different people for one thing or another? This happens to me almost daily. Eventually you manage to handle…

Have you ever run into a case where you open your 3D DWG files in MicroStation and they appear to be 2D files? Well, you’re not alone! Most CAD users aren’t experts in both MicroStation and AutoCAD. So it is the norm to run into problems going from one to the other. One of the…

Rick Sewell, beloved CAD ace, lives to help CAD users get their projects done on time. For years, you’ve been using the Element Information tool to see what kind of stuff your elements are made of. While you usually find the information you’re looking for, you also find a whole lot more information that you…

You have been there — a project deadline is closing in and you still have to import several giant spreadsheets, containing material information, specifications or measurements, into your CAD drawing. You try to import one spreadsheet and, to your horror, they’ve imported strangely. The cells are off, the numbers are misplaced and they don’t follow…

By Rick Sewell, Axiom Director of Customer Services If you want to impress your co-workers and superiors, then provide them with a 3D PDF that really shows your handiwork. (As a note, you will need a PDF viewer that can handle 3D PDFs such as Adobe PDF Viewer or BlueBeam’s Revu.) Here’s how: Start by…

Scale bars can be added as a cell, a reference file or directly created in the design file. It is a full scale representation of actual size. It will scale up or down proportionally to whatever size image you create. Since a scale bar reflects what a specific distance is within the JPEG image, a…

Do you work with scanned drawings, such as TIF or CIT graphics files, referenced to MicroStation DGN files? Do you notice that they never seem to be perfectly level and they’re often full of noise? Do you currently have to fix them outside of MicroStation, or in a complicated MicroStation add-on product like I/RAS B…

Want to speed up your design work in V8i? Try using these keyboard shortcuts. With V8i, you can easily interact with MicroStation’s Main Toolbox, Tasks Toolbox, View Toolbox and Tool Settings dialog box using keyboard shortcuts. These shortcuts allow you to quickly call up a specific tool or tool option without moving the mouse cursor…