another form of interface in autocad is the palette we’ve seen a couple of Hallett’s so far and we’ve mentioned them but we haven’t gone into a lot of detail as to what they are many managers and tools are in the form of a palette the command line is a palette these palettes have tools commands or information in them that allow you to manipulate your objects or add to your drawing one palette that I always use is the property manager palette to open it press the control key and the number one key at the same time this will open up your properties palette it may or may not show up exactly on your screen like I have because I’ve used it before and I’m always using it in my typical workflow I will have the properties palette open all the time I almost never close it unless I happen to need more screen space for some reason but that’s up to you you can do what you want it’s easy to turn off and on just press control one at the same time turn it off or to turn it on so it’s very simple to get – very easy to access
this palette will show you the properties of any object or objects that you’ve selected it also allows you to change the properties of the selected object
so let’s pick something anything if you don’t have anything drawn go ahead and draw something a line a circle anything once you pick it you’ll see here in the properties menu then it tells you what it is
by clicking on this arrow you will also see what you have selected if you’ve selected more than one object I can keep selecting things and add to them now it tells me that I have seven objects selected and that all of them are listed if I click the arrow it better defines what’s been selected one line five circles on one polyline the polyline is this rectangle
I can get to that attributes for that one line and it tells me my starting and ending vertices the deltas their lengths their area how I can unselect these objects by pressing the Escape key and now nothing is selected now the properties palette tells you your current settings in the drawing this properties palette which will go more in-depth on later on has a lot of functionality to it but all palettes have several things in common I can dock them or not dock them I can move them around anywhere I want on my screen I can close them open them back up again I can hide them
hovering over them or moving back over they pop up and when I start to work somewhere else they go away but they’re still here so they don’t take up a lot of room but I can still get to them I can change their sizes all that I want all I need to do is move my mouse over the edge
get the moving arrows
and have at it
to stay out all the time
and if I click on the bar and hold it with a left click I can dock them on the side
or I can just pull them out again if I auto-hide them and then dock them what they’ll do
I can right-click on and allow the docking
or
I can just let them go so you have a lot of display options with your palettes another major palette that I want to show you is the tool pallet press control and three at the same time to bring it up this pallet the tool pallet is full of blocks hatch patterns materials commands custom script files etc it’s the main source for your block library or at least it can be the tool palette is tabbed like the ribbon two different designs onerous architect mechanical electrical civil etc this is the out-of-the-box tool palette but the tool palette is extremely easy to customize essentially you’re going to right click and make a new palette and then literally drag and drop things right into it commands objects etc we’ll talk more about it later but it’s a very useful and a very powerful palette to use it just find the object that you want to insert click it
and then click the point where you want it to go
and you just inserted that object there you go there are many objects in here the mechanical has Imperial and metric samples of different shoulder screws etc nuts bolts things like that textural has different doors and windows and even plants and some vehicles there are so many different tabs in the tool palette that you can’t see them all you can see right here in the bottom that there are a little bit showing right click on it and here are all the possible tabs that you can pick from as you can see some of these even have commands in them like the line construction piling etc so you can put blocks you can put hatch patterns you can put commands into the tool pallet it’s easily customized and very powerful another useful palette is the quick calc palette that’s a calculator so you can essentially have a calculator with you inside autocad wherever you go just press ctrl + 8 at the same time here it is it works like any other pilot you can move it around you can auto hide it you can collapse it you can stretch it out
and it has different formats your regular number pad scientific calculator units conversion etc
you can show some of
detail or hide some of it if it’s too big or too small
we’ll take a look at this a lot closer I just wanted to give you an example of some of the pallets that you can use inside AutoCAD to help you do your job there are some other palettes available but their complexity goes way beyond the scope of this video and we are going to look at some of them more closely later on but suffice it to say the palette is another format of a window that you can interact with inside AutoCAD they can be rearranged in your drawing area they can be docked or locked into position or they can just float around and you can move them as you need to they can hide themselves or they can stay open you can right-click and remember to pick up on the right clicking here you can right-click on things get more options to them you can make the palettes as bars or whichever you need
if I right-click here I can get a lot more different settings
I can hide them even more
completely salad
so when in doubt right-click and use a pallet use a shortcut window use more functionality in your command etc
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