Making a rectangle with Dynamic Input

Using Dynamic Input skips all these issues that we have with coordinates and lets you directly add the length and width of the rectangle, so you will have your rectangle with those dimensions. Before we make a rectangle using the Dynamic Input status bar option, we need to first activate it:

1. Activate the Dynamic Input status bar option by clicking on its icon or using its function key, F12.
2. Start the Rectangle command from the Draw panel of the Home tab or use its REC command. 

3. You will notice a tooltip next to your cursor with coordinate values in real time. Click on any point to specify the first point of the rectangle:

4. Type the length of the rectangle along the X axis and press the Tab key. The length of the rectangle will be locked to a 10 units length and the Y axis width field will become active:

5. Type the width value along the Y axis of the rectangle and press Enter again. In this case, I am using a width of 5 units.

The rectangle will be made with a length of 10 units and a width of 5 units. In this case, we used a positive value of X and Y that is, 10 and 5, but you can use negative values as well to make the rectangle in different quadrants with respect to the first point. For example, the -10 and 5 units will make the rectangle in the second quadrant, -10 and -5 will make it in the third, and 10 and -5 will make the rectangle in the fourth quadrant. The following illustration will clarify this point further:

The rectangle is a four-sided polygon but, in AutoCAD, you can make other polygons, such as a pentagon, hexagon, and heptagon as well. You can even make a polygon with tens or hundreds of sides. You can do all of this using the polygon command, which we will explore next.