If you are tired of opening a drawing and being surprised why some settings are not what you’d think they should be, The new feature called the “System Variable Monitor” or SYSVARMONITOR is now your friend and has your back.

You no longer have to worry about handing off your drawing and then have it come back with someone else’s settings applied to it:

There is a downfall to this new tool – playing practical jokes on coworkers on Aprils fools day wont be so easy…

When you open a drawing that does have some AutoCAD variables that are different than what they normally are or how you’ve defined them to be, you will see a notification in the command line as shown below in image 1. To see what the variable is that has been changed and also give you a chance to reset the variable, use the command SYSVARMONITOR (image 2)

A dialog box will appear (as shown below).

1. Shows the variable(s) in the list that are not set to their “Preferred” setting.
2. Shows the current value to which the variable is set.
3. Lets you quickly reset any variables in the list to the “preferred” values
4. Displays what the “preferred” value is defined to be.

You can add variables to this list as you see fit.

One variable that I like to have consistent is ATTDIA which controls whether a dialog appears when editing attributes. If this is turned off(which I can’t stand) the attribute prompts are shown in the command line only.

Shown below is how to add your variable to this list.
Note – you can also turn on a prompt so that if one of the variables changes, you will get a balloon-type of warning…

Digging a little deeper about how these settings can get changed by one person and then when you open them on a different computer, these settings seem to stay with the drawing.

It is because some variables do stay with a drawing.

for example: when you are in the “OPTIONS” dialog box, when you see a yellow & blue .dwg icon next to a setting, these are variables that are saved in that drawing.

Another place to easily check where a variable is saved is by using the System Variable Editor (SYSVDLG). Some variables are saved in the drawing or in the Registry or even not saved at all. This also a great place to see what the other values of a variable could be since not all variables are 1 or 0 (zero).