Dispatch from Support: Controlling the UNDO Command

You might be wondering how on earth I have time to be blogging so much this week. Well, these "Dispatches from Support" are little how-tos that I've written up for my Enterprise Priority customers. With minimal tweaking I can one-button publish from MS Word 2010 to Blogger.

The Question:

My UNDO command seems to be misbehaving. Every action is accounted for when I try to UNDO. For example, if I create and object, pan with my middle mouse wheel and then and to undo the creation of the object I have to hit undo 2-3 times! With Civil 3D it seems even worse!

My erudite answer:

The behavior of UNDO in Civil 3D uses the same settings as AutoCAD. In all versions of AutoCAD panning and zooming are considered actions so you will always need to undo several steps if you have panned between actions. 

There are few things that will help you.  First, in the AutoCAD Options area, make sure that the options for “Combine zoom and pan commands” is checked. 

Also, when using UNDO, you can undo multiple actions by using the pull-down menu in the Quick Access Toolbar. Many Civil 3D commands will result in a “Group of Commands” entry in the UNDO list because the Civil 3D portion of the program is performing multiple tasks. Inellizoom and Intellipan are the listings seen when using the middle mouse wheel for panning and zooming actions.

Lastly, typing UNDO (the full word, not just U) at the command line will offer additional options. By default, the All option should be on, but you can use the options in the UNDO command to set a mark so that you can quickly get back to a point in time earlier in your AutoCAD session.

Many users have expressed the wish that panning and zooming get ignored altogether in the undo command. I hope that in the future this could be an option, but for now multiple UNDOs are usually necessary.