For September, Harry's picks include the following:

Change Xref Layer Colors Quickly — Leland Leahy — The tip author uses this routine to change all the layers in an AutoCAD xref. You can modify the color to your liking, but Leland uses 250 to screen back the xref entities really quickly. Of course, since this routine only changes the xref layer colors, anything in the xref whose color is not bylayer probably will not change.

Create Blocks Automatically — Raymond Rizkallah — Recent versions of AutoCAD have streamlined the Group command; now, creating a group is as easy as selecting the objects. You can apply that concept to making blocks with this LISP file, which contains two functions.

Construct Window Frame Dividers — Raymond Rizkallah — This AutoCAD routine constructs window frame dividers in elevation. There are two different functions available after you load the LISP routine. DIV will draw an array of squares or rectangles based on prompts that determine the spacing and number of divisions. DIV1 will do the same thing, except that divider lines are included between the rectangles.

Copy to All Layouts — Alan Thompson — Sometimes you run across a routine that makes you wonder why something so simple, yet powerful, isn’t part of AutoCAD to begin with. This routine is one of those. It copies selected objects from one layout to the same location in all other layouts within the current drawing.

Find Drawings Containing Civil 3D Surfaces — Mat Kirkland — This routine is designed to work with AutoCAD Civil 3D. It will iterate a user-specified directory full of drawings and open each drawing programmatically using ObjectDBX, searching model space for Civil 3D surfaces. If one or more drawings containing a surface are found, a report is created in Excel and displayed for the user; otherwise, a message is displayed at the Command line.