Leaderboard

I know what you mean. I had to learn Civil 3D when it first came out, and there was nobody to teach it, so it was trial and error. During this period, management put in a keystroke counter, so they could "measure our productivity." When you work smarter, you have to pause to plan your work, so you actually end up using fewer keystrokes and getting more done--but when they only count your keystrokes, it looks like you're doing less work. I was lucky, I found another position and quit before they could fire me. I've been using AutoCAD since 1991, and I'm still learning things. One tip is to find a command you don't know and try it when you think it might help. You can always Undo. It's like a "word of the day" calendar--enlarge your AutoCAD vocabulary. Another tip is to adjust your workflow to Civil 3D. It makes certain assumptions about how you do a job, such as the order of steps. If you go against the workflow, you usually have to backtrack and work around and waste time. Ask the other drafters for advice when you get into trouble, or at least look over their shoulders. Surely management can't object if you're trying to increase your productivity.

You're quite right that your sslength construct is faster especially/mainly because of the one time only use of entget , no doubt about that. Just wanted to create a 'one-liner' with as few variables as possible. Also looked at it from the perspective of theory v.s. practice. How many text can you manually select / fit in one drawing to be still practical. A couple of dozen? The gain in performance wouldn't be that great , not enough time to get a cup of tea. But when using ssget "x" and maybe hundreds or thousands of drawings like I usually have to deal with , every millisecond counts and your's would be superior (of course) , you're the man /

You are right, startup set to 0 or 1 opens a drawing1, set to 2 or 3 doesn't.

Discard all that previous information. Its actually an autocad setting. You type Startup and set the value of 2. All is well then https://forums.autodesk.com/t5/autocad-mep-forum/how-to-quot-not-quot-open-drawing-1-when-autocad-starts/td-p/2143061