It’s been a little over a week since I last posted. My wife and I had our second child and I picked up some contract drafting work so I’ve been a little busy. But doing the contract work is helping me find even more practical uses to some AutoCAD “tips & tricks.”

I received a .dwg file that was not made with  and Autodesk product. It was converted from a program called VectorWorks to a .dwg format. When I received the file, the file size was 7.96 mb and contained 37525 objects. After I ran the Express Tool OVERKILL, it deleted 30599 useless/overlapped objects and reduced the file size to .98 mb. and sped up the computer’s performance a lot.

To do this:

• OVERKILL <enter>
• Or on the Ribbon: Express Tools > Modify panel > “Delete Duplicates” button

• ALL <enter> to select all objects in the drawing
• <enter> once more to accept the selection set

The OVERKILL dialog box is where you can see all of its glorious power. Here you can tell OVERKILL to ignore certain properties and at the bottom is where my favorite features are located. Polylines that have too many vertices will be simplified and overlapped objects of the same layer and length will be deleted.

• After choosing your settings, click OK and wait. On the file that I cleaned up using OVERKILL, it took a couple of minutes because it was just that bad of a drawing…

I would suggest using this command along with PURGE and maybe even an AUDIT just to be safe. You may want to use this before sending this to other people or before you file away a completed project just to reduce the file size. So try this on a file and see if it speeds up you life. It surely worked for me.

To clarify what the “settings” dialog box does:

The upper portion called “Object Comparison Settings” are all unchecked by default. These are properties that if checked, Overkill will ignore. The “Numeric Fuxx” is the “Fuzz factor” and it is set to 0 (zero) by default. This looks for how closely objects are overlapped. So if you have two lines that look overlapped, but one is ever so slightly off – you can increase this “fuzz factor” and overkill will look for objects that are ever so slightly overlapped.