AutoCAD 2013 has introduced a great new feature that allows you to select objects and then preview their property changes prior to assigning those properties to the objects. This a familiar feature that you may have used in other applications such as Microsoft Word. In Word, you can select some text and then change its font or color but before you press the mouse button to assign the new property, if you hover your cursor over the desired property, you will see a preview of how it will look when applied to the objects. The same is true with Text fonts, line types colors… in AutoCAD 2013.

This new feature might be a little demanding on some computers so if that is an issue, you may want to turn off this feature. To do this, you can do it 2 ways.

1) simply use the system variable in the command line or in the system variable dialog box (SYSVDLG <enter>). The system variable is simply PROPERTYPREVIEW <enter> and the variables are either 0 (zero) or 1.

• 0 (zero) = Property Preview OFF
• 1 = Property preview ON

2) The other Method of controlling the Property Preview is in the Options dialog box.

OPTIONS <enter> or OP <enter> or right click and select options…

Click the “Selections” tab and then uncheck the box next to “Property preview” (shown below).