Hope This Helps – My Insights Feature in AutoCAD: Tuesday Tips With Frank

[The AutoCAD Blog]

HTH. It’s internet/text message slang for Hope This Helps. Experienced AutoCAD users are a wonderful bunch of people, as most of them love to offer assistance and mentorship to others. Now it’s AutoCAD’s turn to hopefully help you. Since the 2022.1 release, AutoCAD has included the ultra-useful My Insights feature.

You can access it in several ways. The easiest is probably via the Start Tab in AutoCAD (below image – left.) You can also find My Insights from your Autodesk account page (below image – right). You can even have Autodesk email your insights to you. Sorry, snail mail is not available.

OK, Frank, tell me more. What exactly is My Insights? In short, it’s personalized information based on your usage of AutoCAD. You’ll be able to see your own Insights, and your product administrator will see team-based Insights.

Next question. What kind of information are you talking about? Well, there’s a lot. There are too many to list here, so I’ll just provide this link to see them all for yourself.

But let’s concentrate on some of the most interesting and the categories that they fall within.

My Insights

When you go to your My Insights page, you’ll see two tabs. The page will begin with the My Insights tab open. Here, you find things like recommendations for various tools or features that may improve your workflow. In the image below, you’ll notice that My Insights is suggesting that the user utilize Floating Drawing Windows. It has analyzed the workflow and noticed that multiple drawings are often being worked on simultaneously.

You’ll also see a personalized usage detail report, which can also help you work more efficiently. How well is AutoCAD itself responding for you? Here, you’ll get a chart showing median response times for startup, file opens, and file saves. So the next time you go to IT asking for a faster computer, you’ll be armed with accurate stats.

How’s this for a cool Insight? Autodesk has noticed (bottom left of image) that the user is often working with a high number of layers and has suggested using Layer States and Filters to be more efficient. Are you not familiar with those features? Just click on the Learn More button!

You may also get suggested Action Macros based on your usage. In the below example, instead of using the three commands Move, Copy, and Rotate, My Insights offers a macro that utilizes the Express Tool called MoCoRo.

My Usage Details

The second tab is all about analyzing your command usage. It will display an in-depth summary of your command usage by category over the past 30 days in various ways.

These charts and tables can help you understand which commands you use frequently and discover adjacent commands that might be helpful for you.

The My Usage Details report summarizes your personal usage of AutoCAD in two ways: by commands and by command categories.

In the upper left of the image below, you’ll see two tabs. The Command Categories tab contains a chart that displays your command usage by category in the past 30 days. Click on a segment in the chart to view the top commands in that specific category.

The other tab is Command Trends. Here, you can see a line chart showing your command usage over the last six months. It is broken down into common, occasional, and rare types.

At the bottom of the My Usage Details tab, there is another handy chart that displays details about your Top 10 command categories in the past 30 days: frequency of use by type, commands used, and total usage. If you’d like more information on an entry, just expand the row for a detailed chart of what commands you’ve used.

Gratitude and Disclaimers

Thanks to technical difficulties on my end, I’d like to offer my heartfelt gratitude to fellow Expert Elite member Kristina Youngblut for providing the two in-program Insights images shown (in dark mode.) Be sure to check out her year-long Community-Driven Collaboration Project – A Tip a Day! on LinkedIn. The mission is to share 365 Autodesk-related tips over the next year—one tip every single day. (And you’ll see some tips from yours truly on Tuesdays!) 

How’s that for irony? I started this blog by referring to the shorthand HTH and ended up getting bailed out by a friend and colleague who helped me by providing the images. Isn’t that just the AutoCAD way?

Others are there to help when you need them, and now AutoCAD itself is hoping to help you with individual product usage data, delivering customized insights to speed up work and improve your proficiency.

More Tuesday Tips

Check out our whole Tuesday Tips series for ideas on how to make AutoCAD work for you. 

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