I’m a huge fan of the Object Manager Docker (shown at right) as it provides so much information on my drawing as a whole and the objects within it. For that reason, I almost always have the Docker open so I can see what it contains. There are situations where that can slow you down and I have hit those situations quite often in the past few days.

If you are importing files with an incredibly large number of objects, this can cause some grief. We’re talking about files with thousands of objects. The average user doesn’t work with files filled with that many objects on a regular basis.

Where the Object Manager Docker has slowed me to a crawl this week is when I was running macros. Most often this would be true of a macro that is changing the information shown in the Docker. Meaning the Docker has to be updated as the macro is doing its thing.

The two macros I’ve been using a lot lately are Thumbnailer and File Converter. Thumbnailer is an automated way to create a catalog of files and their names. Each file it places into the catalog adds numerous entries into Object Manager. Heck, it could be adding hundreds of objects with each file if you don’t convert the thumbnails into bitmaps. The more files you import into the catalog, the slower it gets. Just by closing Object Manager, the process goes at least twice as fast though it could be much faster as I haven’t timed it.

File Converter is opening files and then resaving them (converting them) to a different format. For each file opened, the contents are displayed in Object Manager. Files with a lot of objects will not only open slower, they’ll display slower in Object Manager. Just as with Thumbnailer, simply closing Object Manager will speed things up drastically. If you are only converting 20-30 files, no big deal. Increase that number to hundreds of files and the time saved is a huge deal.

You do not need to completely close the Docker, simply collapse it to an icon so the contents aren’t visible. Make sure you do this before running one of these macros or you’ll probably smack yourself in the head as you watch everything happen much slower than expected.