I was drawing a simple bracket for six hours before a coworker pointed out my mistake

I was working on a bracket design in AutoCAD, just a basic support piece. I had the main shape done but was stuck on the hole pattern, trying to get the spacing perfect by typing in each coordinate. After six hours, my coworker Mike walked by and said, 'You know you can just use the array tool, right?' I felt so dumb. I'd been manually placing every single hole for years, thinking that was the 'proper' way. He showed me how to set the distance and count in about thirty seconds. It was one of those facepalm moments that changes your whole workflow. Has anyone else had a basic feature in their software that they just missed for way too long?

3 comments

3 Comments

simonh781mo ago

Oh man, I feel that. Spent two years in Photoshop manually copying and pasting layers to make a grid. My wrist was killing me. Then I watched a random tutorial for something else and saw the guy use the align and distribute tools. My whole life was a lie. It's crazy how you can use a program every day and just miss a core feature. That moment when you learn it is equal parts amazing and embarrassing.

patriciacarr1mo agoTop Commenter

My cousin did graphic design for a magazine and told me she spent three months manually spacing text boxes before someone showed her paragraph styles in InDesign. Honestly, that feeling of finding a tool that should have been obvious is the worst. Tbh I've had moments like that with just the basic settings on my phone. It makes you wonder what else you're doing the hard way right now.

the_grant1mo ago

Maybe we're all just scared of the help menu.