Oops! How to correct an error in AutoCAD

No, I’m not talking about the infamous Britney Spears number, I’m talking about correcting an error in AutoCAD that you’ve made. AutoCAD users, especially of Civil 3D, will be familiar with accidentally deleting something and not noticing. One of the reasons for this in Civil 3D is that in order to get to the tools for any object, the quickest way is to select the object - you can then use the tools you want. For example, when putting a spot height on a surface, you select your surface and use the add label tool.

Now, sometimes this is just a temporary marker that you will delete. If you don’t press ‘Esc’ twice when you’ve finished adding labels, the surface will remain in the selection set and when you delete your temporary labels, you also delete your surface. If you don’t notice and carry on doing stuff, therein lies the problem.

When I’m on site or training someone I often see them pressing ‘CTRL Z’ or ‘U’, or even the very long winded ‘UNDO’ command repeatedly until the drawing is back to where they want it. Of course, the downside is that they lose everything they did in between the “Noticing the problem” and the final “Undo”.

So firstly, rather than keyboard shortcuts, the UI can help you to see exactly where your problem started. Use the arrow next to the undo command to see exactly what you have done since the delete:

Now, here’s an option. Instead of losing all the things I did after the erase, I'll just type “oops” into the command line. This will undo just the last delete.

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