Using Hatching to Calculate Areas

Did you know that you can extract areas from hatching? say you are hatching a undisturbed creek buffer and you want to know the area. just use the area command and select object to get the answer. this saves a lot of time versus the old way of having to draw a rough polyline around an area in question.

Microsoft Office and Civil 3D

I don't know how many times I have noticed people still doing things the old way when it comes to inserting word and excel documents into a drawing. I always end up showing them the advantages of pasting a link to the original document so that when the document is revised the drawing is automatically updates too.
In either program it works the same with the document open copy all of the contents to the clipboard. In  Civil 3d on the Ribbon press the down arrow on Paste and select paste special then make sure paste link is selected. Now when ever you update your document file the drawing withe the document will update.

"Creative" Free Online Storage

You have seen the advertisements for online storage sites for your files. They charge you either a monthly fee or some other way; well I can give you a idea that could be more useful for you and better yet it's free. The users who already use Google's Gmail service already now this trick and if not here you go.
First you sign up and create your email account then email yourself files from where ever you are. Google keeps the files on their servers and you can organize the data in folders. The amount of space in each email account as of this post is 7562 MB and growing every second. The only limit you may encounter is the file size limit per email which is 20mb per file which is still alot more than other email services. I use my Gmail account to store files and then when I'm at a remote location I always have access to them. Hope this helps.

Viewport Cycling

A common problem when you have overlapping view ports is that sometimes you can't edit one of them or it acts unwieldy. The solution is to be in model space on your current tab and press "CTRL+R" to cycle thru all of the view ports that are present. It is similar to cycling thru objects.

Windows 7 Activation

Today's tip has nothing to do with Civil 3d, but this is still a valuable tip. When you install Windows 7 you have a option to activate the product upon completion of the installation process. I always like to spend some time making sure everything works together on the computer; because you may have to reinstall Windows and you know the headache involved with re-activation.

This tip allows you to rearm the 30 day activation clock up to 3 times, which gives you a total of 120 days to experiment before you have to activate.

Press the start button and browse to the command prompt under program files - accessories (Never type cmd in the search line the rearm command will not work). change the directory to c: (cd\ enter) next type in this line slmgr (space) -rearm and press enter. You will have to reboot your system but when you do you should notice the 30 day clock has been reset.