2D drawing in Autocad is easy, as long as you follow a few simple guidelines. Firstly create a new drawing by clicking on the Application button on the top left of the workspace, and choose New, then click on a DWT template file. If you don’t yet have your own drawing template, use the acadiso.dwt file – this is the default Metric template that ships with Autocad. In our Autocad courses we show you how to create your own working drawing template with layers, annotation styles, and sheet sizes with your company’s logo and title box.
Now it’s best to adjust your Units and Limits. Type UN or Units in the Command line at the bottom of the screen and hit Enter – a dialog box will appear. Note that Type is set to Decimal, but change the Precision value to 0 and hit OK. The program will still be precise to several decimal places – they just won’t (annoyingly) show up in your Command window. Then type Limits and hit Enter. Drawing limits basically describe your working space, like a virtual real-scale drawing sheet. Have you ever been sent a drawing and had trouble zooming and panning around it? The reason is that the person who drafted it didn’t give themselves large enough drawing limits. easy to fix – just type in Limits and make the space bigger. Autocad will ask you for a bottom left corner point and an upper right corner point – these two adjacent points describe the size of your drawing space. So hit Enter to accept eh default bottom right of 0,0. Then punch in numbers for the upper right corner. For example, if you want to draw a house elevation of 10m,make the upper right point 20000,15000 (20x15m). Type in Z  and Enter, then A and Enter – this is the keyboard shortcut for View > Zoom > All. This shows you your whole drawing sheet. Got to Application > save and browse to where you want to keep this drawing. Note it will be saved as a DWG file, which is Autocad’s native file format and can be shared with other programs. You are now ready to start drawing.
The top left tab of the Ribbon is the Draw tab – here we have various tools for drawing different shapes. Or you can type L for Line tool, etc. Most 2D tools have keyboard shortcuts. Note now what Autocad’s asking you in the Command line: Specify First Point – click somewhere in your drawing. Then it asks you to: Specify Next Point, and so on, till you want to end the drawing command. Then you hit Enter or Escape (top left of your keyboard). We will explore many more Autocad 2D drawing features in later blog posts.
More information on all features of Autocad can be found at the AutoDesk website.
And see many examples of our clients’ work on our Facebook page.
Other related Autocad 2D Blog Posts:

• Autocad 2D basics
• Autocad 2D introduction