DesignCenter and Tool Palettes: A Perfect Match

VOLKER COCCO: I started with AutoCAD in 1991, so it's been a while. Love it. It changed my life. And I love what I can do with the stuff. You know? It's just technology. And it's changed quite a bit.

So we'll do some introductions. I'm a real novice with PowerPoint. There we go. It worked. All right. I'll start with my partner, here, Nauman Mysorewala. He is keeping me on track.

NAUMAN MYSOREWALA: Trying to, at least.

[LAUGHING]

I've been helping Volker with the Build Your AutoCAD IQ webinars that we have every month now. So I've been doing that for the past two years almost. And I'm an Autodesk Expert Elite, which is basically, I'm on the consumer side. I don't work for Autodesk. But--

VOLKER COCCO: Yeah.

NAUMAN MYSOREWALA: --expertise kind of.

VOLKER COCCO: Great, thank-- he's been terrific with helping. I mean, he's good with AutoCAD, Revit, needlepoint--

[LAUGHING]

No. Just made that up. I lied.

[LAUGHING]

Anyway, so I work for Autodesk, and prior to that, I've been a drafter. I've been a CAD manager, worked for several resellers. So started with AutoCAD release-- what was it? 10. Yeah, release 10. It's been a while. Brain's foggy. And have worked, obviously, through all the progressions, all the different versions, and like I said, I love it. I'm based out of Lake Oswego, Oregon, where we have one of our main hubs and certainly loved living there as well.

So couple things, some housekeeping tasks, here. If this class isn't what you expected, if-- and it's going to be kind of awkward. They have the keynote happening about 30 minutes before the class ends. So awkward moment there. But if you feel the need to leave, I'll be hurt, but I won't hold it against you, OK? I understand some people get bored or maybe this isn't what they were expecting. So there's no need to be here. You know, you may know of a better event happening or something that peaks your interest, anyway.

We will have a Q&A, as much time as time allows, after the class. So feel free to approach-- I mean, ask your questions then. I'll also be attending the Answer Bar after-- I think that opens at 12 o'clock, 11:45, something like that, at the exhibit hall. So if you have additional questions, come on over. And even if it's not about this topic, there are a lot of specialists from Autodesk, from the product team, product managers, engineers, developers, and tech support specialists who are there to answer your questions about the various software that Autodesk has.

So-- oh, yeah. Don't forget the survey. OK? It's always a good thing to fill that out. And I think that's it for that.

Let's talk a little bit about the topic at hand, which is, yeah, DesignCenter. I'm used to sitting behind the computer not standing up front, here. So DesignCenter. It's a-- well, let's talk about our agenda, right? So we're going to talk about DesignCenter, take a look at the interface, what all the tools are, and that just gets you familiar with it. And then we'll talk a little bit about what we can do with it, obviously. And we'll put that to action.

We'll follow that up with the tool palettes, which are very cool, a great way to organize the content that you work with every day. You can tailor these palettes to add commands to them. You can add content from drawings that are on your hard drive, on your network, or even content from a drawing that you have open, creating a scratchpad, so to speak.

Let's say you get a drawing from somebody else. And you don't know their standards and such. You'd create a tool palette, put their stuff on it, and start using it to get your work done. But we'll show you how all that works. It's one of the neatest tools that I've worked with since it was released in 1997. That was about the time AutoCAD released-- 14 was released.

LT's always been a-- well, you could call it the little brother, whatever, or the poor boy on the street compared to the rich kid. And usually has less tools than AutoCAD does-- major tools. In 1997, they changed that with this release and added a tool called the Content Explorer, now called DesignCenter. At that time, it was not available in full-blown AutoCAD, just LT. So a little trivia there.

I was on the beta testing team at that time. And I just-- the thing changed my world. Unfortunately, I had quit drafting. And I was working CAD management at that time and wasn't able to use it as much as I wanted to, unless I was teaching our fellow employees or teaching a class later on when I worked for a reseller. Great tool though.

And what it allows me to do is-- well, I like to think of it as a harvester of data, OK? I can take content that's located, again, anywhere locally or on a network. I can take a look and see what's in a drawing and grab that content and drag and drop it into my current working drawing.

So it is a great way to work with managing your standards, your block libraries, the linetypes you use, and enforcing those standards, and not having to search all over the place for the right stuff, not having to contain everything in one drawing, opening it up as a template, where it's already so bloated that you can't get any work done. You may have seen a few of those drawings and maybe you have a few of those.

I'm not going to tell you what's better or what's not. As long as you get the project work out right, that's the bottom line. But I think that if you haven't worked with DesignCenter, after this class here, you're going to start using it, even if you just use it to drag and drop blocks. It's good stuff.

With DesignCenter, we can also customize our tool palettes, which we'll talk about, and make those a little easier to help us organize our data. We can even open up drawings using DesignCenter. Some of the tools-- keep in mind, as we move along here, that this tool was-- it was introduced before the turn of the century. And--

[LAUGHING]

I don't know. I kind of like--

[LAUGHING]

So keep in mind that it was developed quite while ago. It really hasn't changed at all since it was introduced. So some of it-- you're going to know better ways to do things, as opposed to using some of the tools. But the tools that are available, that you aren't going to find anywhere else, you'll be making use of those.

OK, so the DesignCenter, itself-- it's a dockable, or floating pallet, just like any other-- like your Layer Manager or anything else, you can auto hide it. You can dock it. You can attach it to the side. You can resize it. And what we have, here-- let me find this point here.

This is called the treeview. This is your content view. And by clicking on one of these-- these are called dictionaries, technically-- but one of these symbol libraries, here-- if you click on one of these that displays the content over here. So right now, a drawing is selected. And it displays the different dictionaries, which are containers for linetypes, dictionary for text. And it's all used programmatically. You don't really have to remember that.

But this is typical in any AutoCAD drawing, these containers. Whether it's a new drawing with nothing in it-- well, they all contain something-- but depending on what you have, once you double click, or activate, one of these symbols, it will show you what blocks are in the drawing, what linetypes are in the drawing, what layouts are in the drawing.

Here, we have an image preview. This works primarily on blocks. So when I select the block, here, it displays there. If you have a description for your blocks, that's where that appears. And it really doesn't work on anything else but blocks and other drawings. But it is there, especially nice to see the image of the block.

Then, of course, we have our toolbar, up here. We'll discuss that as we do the demo in a moment.

And we have our three tabs, here, which are to look for content on the local drive or network. You can even type in a website and open up a drawing from there if you have them stored somewhere on a server, access through any kind of web service, whatever.

And the other-- second tab is open drawings. So any drawings I have open, I can just switch back and forth between those to grab content. And of course, a history of content that I've used previously.

Again, the toolbar. We'll talk about that some more as we move along in the demo. I try to keep the PowerPoint short. I know it seems like they're going on forever, right? All right. Yeah, so it has that same functionality, flexibility, that other palettes have.

Moving on to tool palettes. Pardon me. Moving on a tool palettes. Again, just like DesignCenter, the tool palettes are a container that we can resize, dock. It can be on another monitor, whatever.

Unlike other palettes, the tool palette is a container for pallets. OK? All the little tabs are their own individual palettes of content. And of course, AutoCAD comes with sample palettes. We'll take a look at those when we get into the demo, as well.

And what's nice about these palettes is that even if you don't customize, if you aren't familiar with customizing-- and it's one of the first things I learned with AutoCAD was, how do I customize this? How do I automate things? How do I enforce my standards? OK? I need to have text on this layer, dimensions on this layer. I maybe want a command to actually be a macro of several commands, OK?

I may not know how to customize the CUI, but it is very easy to tailor a tool palette to automate things as well as enforce company standards. And standards-- you should have them, whether you're a large organization or you work alone as a contractor.

We can easily create palettes from other drawings. So we can drag and drop using stuff in our current drawing without DesignCenter onto a tool palette. We can open up DesignCenter to populate our palates. We can use the CUI to add commands to them. Palettes can be stored locally.

If you have a large organization, you can actually place the content of the palettes-- they're called ATC files. You can place those on a server somewhere and share those among the users. You can even apply read-only settings to them, so that they don't get modified accidentally by users working with the content. And I think, that's about it. That's it. Class over.

[LAUGHING]

No. All right. Just kidding. OK.

So one thing to note about tool palettes-- I said they could be shared. And the default location out of the box installed, is in your app data folder, roaming, Autodesk, blah, blah, blah, if you've seen that folder. It's fairly lengthy, but you can easily change it right there, in options dialog. Type op at the command line or right mouse click over the command line, and you'll get into the options dialog, among other ways and change the path there.

You can even have more than one path. So if you have different types of tool palettes-- tool palette catalogs for different types of disciplines, maybe, different projects you're working on, you can have more than one location for storage of these. Or have them located in-- well, however you want, really. Add another path to that set of palettes. And the path that is at the top level-- so if I have two paths there, whichever one was on top, that would be the default tool palette set that you would be working with in AutoCAD.

So again, we can export these. We can import our pallets after we've created everything the way we want, and share them on the network. It does require some planning. There's some additional stuff that needs to be done.

There's actually a class on working with tool palettes and networking them that-- I'm not sure. I meant to put it on the PowerPoint. Or-- Yeah. And I neglected to do so. But anyway, take a look at that. It's in the AU app, and-- if you have an interest in doing that.

And speaking of that, I just found out that Nauman, here, had informed me right before the class that last night I uploaded a new data set and script, because we noticed some content was missing. I looked for it all over. Couldn't find it under the sofa cushions, so I had to add it back to the script, uploaded it. But if you tried accessing that data set and script today, we were told it'd be about another half hour or so before it was going to be available. They had some kind of problem.

So if you previously downloaded the data set and script, you may want to do so again, just to get the update. That's it for PowerPoint. Yay. I am not a big fan of PowerPoint.

I'm going to go ahead and let Nauman switch to AutoCAD. What have we got to do to turn this thing off? The PowerPoint.

NAUMAN MYSOREWALA: Oh.

VOLKER COCCO: Just Task Manager.

[LAUGHS]

There we go.

NAUMAN MYSOREWALA: [INAUDIBLE].

[LAUGHING]

VOLKER COCCO: Can't take him anywhere.

NAUMAN MYSOREWALA: Geez.

VOLKER COCCO: There you go.

[LAUGHS]

All right. Can you see OK? I actually had to teach a class once, where the projector would not allow me to see my screen. And I had to-- are we doing this OK? You know? Had to just do the entire class like that, working with attributes.

Anyway, so here's AutoCAD. Hopefully everybody can see that OK. And let's go to the view tab, Nauman. And here is where we can find both the DesignCenter palette, as well as tool palettes. DesignCenter's got the tiny little icon, there. You can also type adc, adc navigate. I like to use control-two-- very easy to open and close DesignCenter.

And here we go. Yeah. Here we are. So by default, DesignCenter opens up in the AutoCAD samples folder under see program files, Autodesk, AutoCAD, blah, blah, blah. OK. It's not blah, blah, blah. There's a real path.

But-- so we're seeing a lot of stuff here I really don't need to see. I need to maybe have a-- I have a location where I keep all my project stuff. And we can easily just have a home folder that we can set DesignCenter to. There's command ADC navigate, or I have our data set located on the desktop, and going to that-- browsing to that folder, here in DesignCenter, we can select that folder, and make it our home folder, by right mouse clicking and selecting set as home. There we go.

And now, if we click on the toolbar button, up there, for the home button, with a little house, OK? It'll take us immediately to that. If we go ahead and launch DesignCenter later on, it's going to open up to that location, as well.

In addition to the home button, we can also add favorites. So there's a little folder up there with a star on it. And it's our favorites. And we can actually place the content that we use most frequently, add it as a favorites shortcut, so that we can easily get to those drawing files to grab that content.

So we'll go ahead and select add to favorites, and notice the preview image down there. And a little bit of data there, not much for a description. If you were to go into DWG Props in AutoCAD, it'll open up the properties. And you can put additional data in there-- a little sidetrack, there.

And if we want to organize our favorites-- so after a while, you're probably going to add all kinds of stuff there. You don't want to see that in your favorites. Well, there's a location in your profile where Windows Explorer stores favorites, OK? That's kind of what this technology is making use of. And what we can do is we can easily get to that favorites folder by just right-clicking in the content window, right mouse clicking, and selecting organize favorites, which then opens up the Windows Explorer. So here, you can delete the shortcuts that you have in there and remove those you don't need.

So-- all right. So the next button that we should be taking a look at-- of course, we have our forward and back folder browsers. We have our up browser as a button as well-- all standard stuff. There's a search tool. I'll be very blunt. The search tool-- it's not that great, OK? So I'm not even going to discuss it, here. Play with it if you'd like. Again, this is older technology-- a lot of things have happened with the operating systems. And it's not as effective as it once used to be.

We do have Windows icons here. So we can change out how we want to view this. Do we want to see details? Do we want to see small icons, list view, et cetera? All familiar with that.

We can close our treeview button, window, open it up-- the content-- any of the windows we can close them here. So all pretty standard stuff.

This button, here, for opening a drawing, or content. It could be anything. It doesn't have to be a drawing. You could open up a hatch pattern file. But it allows me to open up a drawing file. And in this case, we're going to go ahead and go to the desktop. And we'll select one of the main drawings we're working with-- working tool palettes. And by opening this up, we can drag and-- my mistake, here. In this-- we can see the symbology that's in this drawing, here.

But we can also use this just to open that file by either dragging and dropping it onto our command line, or by holding down on the control key, we can drag and drop the file to either the drawing window or the command line to open it. If you don't hold down on that control key, and you drag it and drop it into the AutoCAD drawing, it actually inserts it as a block. OK?

And you can do that from Windows Explorer, if you aren't familiar with that. So Windows Explorer-- drag and drop your drawing onto the command line, opens it into the drawing, insert as a block.

And I wasn't watching. Did you do any of that?

[LAUGHING]

I'm usually over there, OK?

NAUMAN MYSOREWALA: [? Love it. ?]

VOLKER COCCO: No, no. It's OK. I don't expect anything out of that. OK. So some cool technology there. So let's take a look at our library files. Now, I have a very small amount of library files, here. In the real world, we have hundreds and hundreds of drawings. We have hundreds of-- maybe hatch patterns or linetypes that we work with.

And if I were to-- want to start a new project, I may have a company template that has all this stuff in it. But I may be a contractor and work with multiple disciplines, multiple customers. So I don't want everything in one template file. I can't have it there. So what I can do is use DesignCenter to populate a new drawing with the standards that I need. OK? So DesignCenter isn't meant to just work with blocks.

I have a couple of drawings in here. We have a layers drawing. We have a drawing that is a library drawing for blocks. And let me just pause, there, with the blocks for a moment. We all store blocks in different manners. When I started out with AutoCAD, everything was a block-- was written to the hard drive. It was an individual file that I inserted, or it was already existing in a drawing.

Once DesignCenter came out, I found a better way to do this, to organize my block library, was to have things like-- in this example here, we have contacts and switches. Have all those blocks be in one drawing file, so that they're not spread all over the place-- easier to manage. And then I can use DesignCenter to go ahead and insert those blocks into my drawing.

And I'm just going to let Nauman insert a couple of blocks into this new drawing, here, which we know has nothing but layer 1 in it. And we can do this several different ways. One-- we can pick and drag. And when I say pick and drag, it's the left mouse button-- holding down on it, dragging it, and then letting go of the mouse button. And that drops it into the drawing. OK?

We can also double click a block, which opens up our insert dialog to where we have a little bit more control. If we need to modify a block, we can actually right mouse click it-- and note the insert option, as well. But we can open it up in the block editor from here to modify it.

With the block editor, you would want to-- once you've made your changes-- you'd want to then re-insert that block into your drawing. And what happens then? Working with blocks, if you just insert the block, it knows it already exists in the drawing. It's already a definition or a block reference-- definition, sorry-- in the drawing. So it would insert the same instance. We've made changes. So you want to redefine that block. And that option is there, as well.

So some cool stuff about inserting with blocks, but let's take this one step further. I also need layers, right? I need layers to work with. I need linetypes. I'll need text styles, dimensions styles to work with. And again, they may be from various disciplines. So with layers or any of those options, we can select one or more at a time, and using the shift key, we could select a row, control key, pick specifically which layers we'd want to bring in, and just drag and drop those right into our drawing. And then-- let's go ahead and see the layer-- there we go. So it brings in those layers and the properties for those layers, as well. A real time-saver there.

Do the same thing maybe with some textiles. So in this particular drawing-- and I don't even like those textiles much. Those are sample textiles from AutoCAD. I don't believe in naming my textile the same as the font. But that's me. But we can still insert these and have them available for our project.

Now, if-- plotting, OK? It takes quite a bit of time to create a new layout, right? And once we set it up though, we tend to use it over and over, again. I hope you're not recreating it every time. So I would have a library drawing for my layouts. And I can easily drag and drop those into my drawing, as well. So typically, we have layout one and two.

Go ahead and-- thank you. And then, if we want to, we can just select whatever ones we want. Can't see which ones he's grabbing, but there it is, my cover sheet. Easily put in there, and there it is. So if you have view ports assigned to those layouts, those are brought in, as well.

Oh, what did I miss? Oh, linetypes-- we can-- oh, we did those. Yeah, so a bunch of stuff that we use every day to work with our drawings. So you can see there's quite a bit of power, here, as far as that goes.

OK. Now, let's go ahead and talk a little bit about-- oh, Nauman, let's show-- in case you guys aren't familiar-- OK, I should have addressed this a little earlier. Why don't you show them the right mouse click to hide and dock and auto hide, attach left and right? This is cool functionality that you can use with all your palettes-- layer manager, tool palettes. Keep them out of the way. Put them on a different monitor.

So later on when we work, after this, when we work with tool palettes, you'll see how that works, as well.

NAUMAN MYSOREWALA: You have to click on the spine, right here, where-- to modify any of those locations of any of the palettes-- the layers, properties, all the--

VOLKER COCCO: Yeah, so on the title bar. And if you were to grab it from the lower left corner or right corner, you could resize it, as well. And keep the same aspect ratio. All right.

NAUMAN MYSOREWALA: So can you just talk about this very quickly? This button right there? This guy, right here-- it says auto hide or not. So if you-- and I lost my design.

[LAUGHS]

OK. Yeah. So this, right here, this button, that allows you to toggle between whether it should auto hide or not, as well. So you can quickly achieve that by-- if you wanted it to lock it down quickly, not right-clicking and things like that, that icon works very nicely, too.

VOLKER COCCO: There's so many ways to do things in AutoCAD, obviously. And thank you. Because I don't use that. There are a lot of things I don't-- I never used certain tools off of a [? ribbon ?] or pull down, because I use the keyboard. But that's me.

So let's go ahead and close DesignCenter for right now. And we'll get back to it, because there are-- we'll be using it in conjunction with tool palettes. So again, we can get to the tool palettes from the view tab.

If you're using the pull downs-- I don't know, how many people use pull down menus? OK. All right. Fair enough. They're a good way to access your tools. You would find all this under the tools pull down, palettes. And they'd have the list of all the different palettes we have available.

So anyway, tool palettes. So as you can see, just like in the PowerPoint picture I had, the tool palettes have sample content available. And you can actually see what additional palettes are available. I have no idea what they call these little overlapping tabs, here, OK. But it just means I have a rather large tool palette set, OK. And we can switch either between the palettes, either using that menu or if the palettes-- or we see the identifier for the pallet on the tab itself, we can just click on the tab. And these-- if you haven't worked with these samples at all, they've got some cool stuff there for you to get started with creating your own content.

All right. So as you can see we store hatch patterns, and things are predefined here-- layers, colors, scales, OK? We can predefine all these. We'll show you how to do that in a moment. Here are AutoCAD commands. We can have blocks on there. Very cool stuff. So very powerful.

But the thing is, I don't ever work with the samples. I work with my own content. OK. And there are a couple of ways that we can tailor-- a couple. More than a couple, OK? Couldn't think of a better word.

All right. So what we can do is we can easily create a new palette just by right-clicking, actually, anywhere over an empty area of the palette or on the title bar. And once we create a new palette, we can add content.

Now, we have a lot of palettes in this tool palette, right? So the first thing we're going to do is we're going to add a label. And I'm just doing this for demo. I probably wouldn't do this in the real world. But I'm going to add some text here. This may just be text to identify these are commands or these are for architectural or whatever.

In this case, we're going to label this the same as the tool palette name that we're creating, which is tools. In the script, it's called something else, OK. It's just easier just to type tools. But anyway, so an easy way to create a label, OK?

So Nauman, let's go to that drawing that we opened up earlier. And what we're going to do-- we're going to start by adding content that exists in the drawing. Earlier I'd mention that I would often use a tool palette as a scratchpad, OK? So I get a drawing from some other company. I just need to do a quick job on it. I don't want to learn their standards. I don't want to know what layer their text goes on or what layer their blocks go on-- what layers they're using.

So I will take that existing content and drag and drop it to my tool palette. And I'm able to use it in my drawing. So in this case, here, Nauman's adding a chair block that is in that drawing and just dragging and dropping it to populate the palette.

We can also add text. So let's grab some of that text, there. There we go. Drag and drop that. And it just says M Text stuff there. It doesn't know it as anything else. And let's go ahead and plop a separator in there for right now. Come on. So here we can separate stuff, just like we would maybe use a label.

Now, this class isn't about customizing with the CUI, but we can easily grab commands that we have in AutoCAD and populate the palette with those, as well. So we're going to type CUI, but this same command is found on the manage tab of the ribbon, under customize user interface. And I'll just have Nauman type in zoom extends. And that is done. And the command list, right here. And as soon as he starts typing zoom, that all appears-- all the zoom functions appear. And we're just going to go ahead and drag and drop that onto our palette.

All right. So closing that CUI-- the thing here is that I probably don't-- well, like I said, I use it as a scratchpad. But what if I want to take these and create my own standards, OK? I've joined a company. They don't really have any standards, but they are very consistent. But they don't have anything written down, nothing automated. I want to automate it.

Well, tier 7, that tells me nothing. Is it an office chair? Is it a bar stool? Whatever, right. So I can easily modify that by right mouse clicking over it, which brings up a context menu, which allows us to do a few things. I mean, we can cut, delete it off of the pallet. We can copy it. Rename this chair, which is what we'll do. And we'll call it office chair-- so for lack of better verbiage. And then right mouse clicking over that again, let's go into properties.

And here in properties, it has the original block name. It has the source file. We'll talk about this here a little later. It also has the layer name that it is currently on. OK? And there are other properties. And depending on what tool you-- or content you've placed on the pallet, you're going to have different properties available to you, just like anything else. And we can easily change any of those layers, whatever, to our preferred layer or color or-- and I do prefer to work with bilayer.

But I probably wouldn't want to set the explode option from no to yes. What's the point of having a block if you're going to explode it? There are times you'd want to do that. But so we can even put in a rotation. Let's try to put in a rotation on this one, Nauman, of say, 90, I guess, just for grins.

I don't think I have that in the script. So I'm adlibbing. I'm bad about that. He's used to it though.

[LAUGHING]

All right. So let's go ahead and click OK. Let's take a look at the M Text object on there. And again, it tells me M Text, all right. Well, I want it to be maybe a room label, OK? So I'm going to change it to that. I can add a description to it. I'm going to leave everything else the same, including the layer, OK? Actually, I think I have it like employee or something like that in the script, but doesn't matter. We've assigned and told it we want it to be used on this layer.

Let's go ahead and move on to the next-- let's go ahead and click OK. And by the way, in the properties of that-- actually, can you go back in there, Nauman? I meant to mentioned this. In the properties of this, if you scroll down, you'll see that it also allows us to choose the text style that we want to use in that particular drawing. So a good example of different properties that we can change. Just click OK.

Nauman, can I get you to grab one of the cubicle panels and drag and drop that onto the palette? Because what this is is a good example of a command that has several different types of functions. We have a line object. We have a polyline. We have an arch-- excuse me, several different types of lines in AutoCAD.

And so let's go into properties on that. And we'll go ahead and we'll add a name to this. So right now, it's a polyline, but we want to go ahead and call it cubicle panel, all right? We're going to be drawing cubicles later on for this job. And you can, obviously, put in a description, but we don't want to use a fly out-- this, here, by the polyline, indicates it's a fly out, which means I have a choice. I can choose between a polyline, the line, and the other type of line work out there. And so what we-- yeah. Well, there we go. So all the different [? arrays, ?] construction lines, et cetera, are all in there.

In properties, what we want to do is change-- use fly out to know that it will get rid of the little arrow. And because it was a p-line to begin with, that is the default right now. Go ahead and-- actually, we need to backtrack once. My mistake, there. No. In the-- this is us. You should hear us during the webinar. I'm all over the place.

OK. Go back into properties, please. And let's switch it to use fly out? Yes. I went out of order here, because I can't show you this, if that's set to no. This little button, right there, choose commands. Here's where we tell it what we want that to be. Maybe it was a p-line to begin with, but I don't want to work with p-lines. I want it to be a line.

In this case, we're going to keep it a p-line, but we can filter out those functions we don't want. So click OK. And then use fly out? No. Because there's no reason to have that little arrow up there-- just kind of gets in the way. We'll leave the layer property and everything the same, line type the same. And click OK.

So here's the fun one-- zoom extents. And this is off topic, in a way, but let's go into properties. And what we're going to do is go ahead and modify the zoom extents command and add some functionality just to create a quick macro and go ahead-- and want me to type this in real quick? I love macros.

So what I'm just going to do is do this zoom extends, enter. Then I'll go ahead and just have it zoom extend out a little bit more. I'll probably screw this up, because I'm adlibbing. 0.9x. And I'm going to have it do a q save.

So I've just modified this. I'm not trying to teach you how to do macros. Hope I got that one right, because I may blow that myself.

And-- yeah, I did. Just put q save on there [INAUDIBLE]. We'll keep at the 0.9x for right now. Enter. OK. There we go.

NAUMAN MYSOREWALA: Oh, You're already putting on there?

VOLKER COCCO: Yeah. So--

NAUMAN MYSOREWALA: [INAUDIBLE].

VOLKER COCCO: So basically, what it's done right now, is just I've added one little statement on there that allows me to zoom extent and then save. And that way I don't have to-- and there's our save statement, right there.

So I can add commands. I can then tailor those commands to suit my needs. And I always like to have it zoom out a little bit, which is what I was trying to add and then save it. But it saves time.

So Nauman, can you start a new drawing, please? And let's go ahead and draw a quick little cubicle. This is why I love this tool, because I've created this scratchpad for myself or maybe these are my regular standards. And drawing say, a cubicle or-- I can't see from this angle-- apologize.

So we'll go ahead and just create a cubicle wall. And that color just does not stand out well on the screen with the black, but I'm sorry about that. But basically, he's just adding content, here. We won't get too elaborate. Let's go ahead and add a chair. And obviously, the scale's a little off. We're in a default AutoCAD drawing, all right?

But let's go ahead and plop in the label. And so the point, here, isn't really about how to use AutoCAD, all right, scaling or anything like that. The point here is to demonstrate that we've created a tool that quickly allows us to work with our content from other drawings.

Let's go into the-- click the zoom [? extends ?] command. We've added our content. We're going to save the drawing-- or not. And then, let's take a look at the layer dialog. This was a start from scratch drawing-- acad.dwt usually contains one layer. And now it has the layers that were associated with the content that we dragged onto our tool palette. OK?

So these didn't exist. We don't have to worry about them existing. We've set this up in advance to save a little bit of time. And to me, that's pretty powerful. And if you disagree? Well, can't change your mind about that. Does anybody see a good use for this?

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE].

VOLKER COCCO: Yeah. OK. A few nods there. All right. Excellent. No, no, great. I don't expect yay, but this is something as you work with it, right, you're going to find a need for it or a use for it.

AUDIENCE: So those default to the layers that the [INAUDIBLE] were originally on? In the properties dialog, can you reassign them to your own layer structures?

VOLKER COCCO: You can.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE].

VOLKER COCCO: You can. Whatever layer properties you have, you can assign those blocks. And it'll create them. If they don't exist, it'll create that content, as long as it's already assigned to that object. So if I linetype of hidden assigned to the cubicle panel [INAUDIBLE] for whatever reason, it would apply that, as well, in this new drawing. So good stuff there. So that's one way that we can create a palette, but let's go ahead and take a look at what--

[LAUGHING]

Let's take a look at what DesignCenter can do for us with these palettes.

NAUMAN MYSOREWALA: [INAUDIBLE] were just having fun at your expense.

VOLKER COCCO: Well, yeah. But I am so used to that. OK? It doesn't even faze me. I-- just like [? nope. ?] All right. Yeah, let's open up DesignCenter. And let's go ahead--

NAUMAN MYSOREWALA: [INAUDIBLE].

VOLKER COCCO: Huh?

NAUMAN MYSOREWALA: I'm pressing Control-2.

VOLKER COCCO: Oh, he's learned. Shortcuts-- great way to just get stuff done. We all want to be productive.

All right, so let's go to our contents and switches drawing there. And having selected this, let's go ahead and first of all double-click on blocks. And this shows us all the blocks that are contained within that drawing. So again, I want to either insert that-- but let's go ahead and just drag one onto our tool palette. There we go. And that easily-- we would then tailor any layer information we want, OK?

But let's take-- let's go ahead and take a look at that same block dictionary. So under the drawings, name-- blocks.

NAUMAN MYSOREWALA: Say again?

VOLKER COCCO: Go back to blocks under drawings. There you go. All right. Just go ahead and right mouse click over blocks. And you'll see we have [? explorer ?] basically, taking a look, but add to favorites, organize favorites, or create tool palette.

So this will take a moment, but go ahead, and let's create a tool palette. And what's cool about this is that it will take all those blocks-- it's chugging through the drawing right now. And create a palette for you quickly. And this is why I, now, store my blocks in one drawing. OK?

Let's take a-- this is something you need to be aware of, though. So right-click over one of the blocks. Let's take a look at the path [? in ?] the property. So this drawing is in a location of my choosing. If I plan on moving that location for that drawing, the tool palette doesn't know that. It's a hard-coded path. So be aware of that, because if you move this to some other location-- if you want to start on the network, create that palette while that drawing library is on the network. OK?

There-- you could open up the palette file-- the ATC file and modify that. It's an XML file. You can open it up in the text editor. And you can do a search and replace there, but it's better just to do it all in advance, placing it on that.

So that was important to note. Let's go ahead and go back to our AU palette. And we did skip one bit of content that I'd like to show you. We have-- we work with hatches. Anybody not work with hatches? None of you work with hatches?

[LAUGHS]

OK. That's cool. You will. If you haven't already, you will. Hatch patterns-- got to add some definition to your-- how drawings look. We can-- I've only got a few hatch pattern files, here, in our data set. So typically we have our default acad.pat file which has predefined patterns, but, eventually, you start collecting more and more hatch patterns.

And people tend to put those patterns-- adding them to the acad pat. Or I recently had a support case where a guy had 800 hatch patterns, and he had them in a-- because they were all individual pattern files-- and he had them in the support path for AutoCAD. Every time AutoCAD had to-- anytime the hatch command was executed, it would take forever for the images of those hatches to appear.

So there's something to be said for having everything load at once, but only the stuff you really need. And what is cool about DesignCenter is that if you have a location for your hatch patterns, you can then add that location to your favorites. And then load those hatch patterns, as needed, through DesignCenter.

And so we have a hatch pattern here. There are two items, here, in a hatch pattern file. One is the just letting AutoCAD know it's a user-defined hatch pattern. And then, of course, we have the hatch pattern, itself. We can drag and drop that hatch pattern into an AutoCAD drawing. Now, the one thing is that if you've worked with hatches, you may have the wrong scale. And it'll tell you at the command line, it's too dense of a hatch and adjust the scale factor.