From the course: AutoCAD 2026 Essential Training

Editing dimensions and dimension overrides in AutoCAD drawings - AutoCAD Tutorial

From the course: AutoCAD 2026 Essential Training

Start my 1-month free trial Buy for my team

Editing dimensions and dimension overrides in AutoCAD drawings

“

- [Instructor] We're starting another chapter now, and we're going to dive into some more dimensioning techniques that are available to you when you're working in your AutoCAD drawings. We've got a new drawing for you, it's called groundfloorplan.dwg. And as usual, you know the draw by now, download it from the library to follow along with the videos in the chapter. When you open up the drawing, you'll see it's a floor plan of what looks like a residential property. You should be in the Model tab. And you can see all the different dimensions displayed on the drawing. We're going to look at some dimension text editing tools. Now, you can see going across the building here, we've got two dimensions. You've got this one here, two horizontal dimensions. I'd like you to zoom in on the numbers on the left hand dimension. Now, you can see at the moment, that that is 8342. One of the really nice things about any piece of annotation in AutoCAD, it can be a piece of text, it can be a mention annotation, can be anything, but as long as it's annotation, if you double click on it, hover over it, double click on it, you will find that you can edit it. Now, because I've double clicked on the dimension text, the 8342, the text editor contextual tab at the top of the screen on the ribbon has kicked in! That's because it is multi-line text in there. You can see the little flashing cursor on the left hand side near the eight. Using the arrow keys on your keyboard, just press the right hand arrow, and you'll see that that cursor flicks through the dimension text to the right hand side of the dimension text. Press the space bar once for a space, and then type UNO. Now, UNO on a dimension normally means unless noted otherwise. So, it's a little abbreviation that you often put on dimension annotation on drawings. Especially on drawings of buildings and architectural installations, because sometimes, the dimensions might not be exactly 8342. There could be a bit of a tolerance there. Now, because I've done that, all I've got to do now is go up to Close Text Editor, job done. That's all being edited, but AutoCAD is now prompting me, is there another annotation object you want me to edit? There isn't, so just press Enter again to lose that prompt. So, there's our 8342 unless noted otherwise. Zoom out a little bit and pan across. And we've got 5910 there. If I zoom in on that one and just click on the dimension itself, and right click, and go to Properties. Now, on the Properties palette, there's a lot of information. Now, I'm going to make it a bit bigger for you as well. Let's just make it all a little bit bigger. So, I'll just click and drag. There we go, get that, like that so we can see what's going on. Now, it's what they call a Rotated Dimension, which basically means a linear dimension. If I come down a bit, there's a text panel in the Properties. Use the slider bar here like that, or you can use the wheel on your mouse to go up and down in the Properties palette. Notice here there is a text override option. Now, what I'm going to do here is I'm going to type in the text override box Measure onsite, like that. And then, I'm going to put space dash space, and then I'm going to type in two weird little symbols, less than, greater than. Now, you may be asking why is he put less than greater than in a piece of text that says Measure onsite. That less than greater than is telling AutoCAD to put the actual measurement value, which is in the box above the text override in the Properties palette into the text override. So, it will keep the 5910. If I press Enter now, watch what happens to the dimension. Can you see, the Measure onsite kicks in? Dash 5910. So, I close the Properties palette, hit Escape a couple of times, and there you go. There's two very neat little dimension text annotation tools right there.

Contents