You might think that productivity tools in AutoCAD are meant for the realm of add-ins and lisp routines.  But Autodesk has given many advanced features that help with your productivity when creating those amazing designs of yours.  I have seen many productivity tools that are already in AutoCAD been written because they did not know about them.

Taking a look at the mighty Express Tools.  This is a feature (or non-feature) depends which side of the fence you are sitting on which has been a staple of the full AutoCAD but not the AutoCAD LT package (or until recently).

The AutoCAD Express tools are powerful but have not been fully supported by AutoCAD in the past years.  As my memory serves me they also pulled it from a version where it was not available and then the one year Autodesk wanted to charge for it!!  After some robust discussion between avid Express tools users and Autodesk, it was let back into the stable and even filtered down to AutoCAD LT.

The Express tools have the Super Hatch feature.  If you have ever tried to create your own custom hatch you now that it can be quite tricky.  I normally just search the internet to see if someone else has already done it.

With the super hatch function, it makes creating hatches really simple and you can also create hatches that are made of pictures.  Productivity gain!!

There are also many advanced layer functions that have been programmed into the Express Tools making manipulating layers an absolute breeze.