Setting your units of measurement is one of the first things to do when setting up a new drawing in Autocad. We show you how in our Autocad 2D courses.
Before starting drawing in a new document you should always set your units for lines, objects and angles. This may also be set up in your working template so you don’t have to change it each time. Type units into the Command line or go to the top left Application menu, choose Drawing Utilities, then Units. If you are working with a pre-2009 version of Autocad you go to the Format drop-down Menu and select Units.
Now choose a unit of measurement appropriate to your work. In most cases Length > Type: Decimal. And change the Precision to 0. And keep the Angle Type at Decimal Degrees; Precision: 0; Insertion Scale: Millimetres > OK.
When working in Autocad we always create our drawing initially in Model Space and we always work in real sizes, that is millimeters and at a scale of 1:1. It’s in Paper Space that we later scale the drawing for printing.
We reset the precision to 0 in order to prevent seeing the several decimal places after the point. Remember this is 0.000 of a mm. The drawing will still be accurate to that level – you just won’t see it displayed each time on the Command line.
The full list of templates appears when you go to Application > New > Document. For a metric template choose any of the acadiso.dwt templates. Most of the world uses the metric measurements of meters and millimeters.  The three countries still using the archaic Imperial measurements of feet and inches are North America, Myanmar (formerly Burma) and Liberia. And this causes them problems when trying to connect imported mechanical parts. Autocad also lists several imperial templates.
More information on all features of the program 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
• Autocad 2d drawing
• Autocad 2d workspace
• Autocad 2d isometric