A common question that I get is how to use Surveyor’s Units in Land Desktop. Many people become frustrated that after setting the AutoCAD Units command to Surveyor’s Units that it is automatically set back to Decimal Units by Land Desktop the next time you run a Land Desktop command. After all many of you are Surveyors so why shouldn’t you be able to use Surveyor’s Units! Well the short answer is that you can’t because that is just how Land Desktop works. The program is designed to work with the AutoCAD Units set to Decimal for Linear Units and Degrees/Minutes/Seconds for Angular Units.
So now that we have established that setting the AutoCAD Units to anything other than Land Desktop’s default is going to be fighting a losing battle let’s look at what your options are. Usually when I am asked this question all the person wants to do is see the angular units in Surveyor’s Units when performing a List command. You can display this information in the desired format by using some of the Land Desktop commands rather than the AutoCAD List command. One way is to select the object and the Right-Click and select Design Properties. Another way is to go to the pull-down menu and Select Inquiry >> Line/Curve/Spiral then select the desired object. Either of these methods will display the information in the format that you are looking for with out the frustration of fighting against Land Desktop for control of the Units.
