Apply common interface behaviors in palettes

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There are many types of pallets in Autocad.

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And while each has its own functionality,

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they all have certain common behaviors in this video,

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you'll learn the various ways you can display pallets.

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After this video, you will learn to

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access and display Autocad. Pallets

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allow pallets to become docked or undocked,

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turn on or off the auto hide feature,

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anchor pallets to either the left or right side of the editor

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for this module, we'll be using a blank new drawing.

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Of course,

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the changes we'll make here can be done at any time from your open drawings.

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Autocad

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uses pallets for many things.

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There are almost as many ways to access them as there are pallets themselves.

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Again, they all do different things.

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So functionality varies, but they all have some things in common.

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One of those is where you can find most of them

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click on the view tab of the ribbon.

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Here you'll find the pallets panel

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as is typical in AUTOCAD.

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The most often used are shown with large

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icons and the more infrequent tools are smaller,

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there are more to find in the additional tools area.

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I'll click on the down arrow and pin the menu in place.

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These pallets are all more 3d related tools than the others.

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Any pallets that are open will be highlighted.

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You can turn one on by clicking on the icon

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or turn one off in the same manner.

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Let's unpin the additional tools menu and allow it to collapse.

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We'll start by using the properties pallet.

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If it's not already displayed, click on it to turn it on.

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Currently, the pallet is floating

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that is, it's not connected to the main user interface and it can be moved around.

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You can even move it to another monitor. If you like

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moving a pallette is easy,

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just press and hold your left mouse button on

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the sidebar and drag it to your preferred position.

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Release the mouse. When you're done,

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you're also able to resize the pallet

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like most U I objects hover over an edge to see the stretch icon

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again, keep your mouse button down while you stretch

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here, you can see how the bottom stretch works.

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The side opposite of the sidebar does the same thing

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even more efficient though may be the corner stretch icons which

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can resize the pallet in both directions at the same time,

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which is a real time saver.

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Once you get your pallet sized,

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it will stay that way as long as the software is closed properly

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or you can save it to a workspace where it will reside even if it were to crash.

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I mentioned the sidebar let's take a look at that. We'll start at the bottom.

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The first thing you'll see is the pallets icon from the ribbon above that is the name

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at the top left. You'll find three icons.

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The bottom one is the properties icon. We'll come back to that in a moment

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in the middle, you'll find the auto hide icon

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and at the top is the close icon

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normally shown as an X as it is here.

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Let's look at the bottom two icons as I

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assume you understand the concept of closing a pallet,

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click on the properties icon which will open a pop up menu.

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There's another way to get to this menu.

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So I'll move the mouse away and click to dismiss it this

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time place your cursor anywhere over the sidebar and right click,

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you'll get the same menu. This way,

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I personally prefer this method as I don't have to be quite as precise with my mouse.

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Let's leave this menu up so we can go through its different options.

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We'll quickly look at the first three items.

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The first is move. Well, we've already seen how easy it is to move a pallet,

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but so that, you know, it's here too.

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The same goes for size and clothes.

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All three are kind of a long way to get there.

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And using Autocad is always about saving picks and clicks, isn't it?

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So it's off to the good stuff.

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There are a couple of ways to make a pallet dock itself

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to either the left or right side of the U I.

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But to do either

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you have to tell the pallet to allow docking and the properties pop up.

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It's checked by default, but it may not be on your system

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if so click on it to allow

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notice when you do the two options below light up too.

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I'll get to those in a minute.

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Now that docking is allowed drag the pallet to the left until

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you get close enough for the magnetic snap to take over.

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The pallette will change its appearance into a

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white outline in a dark background or black.

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If you're in a white background,

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when it does release the mouse button and the pallet

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will snap onto the left side of the editor.

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The pallette will be fully visible at this point.

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You can resize its width by hovering over

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the right edge until the stretch icon appears,

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press and hold your left mouse button to drag it to your desired whip.

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Now that you've docked your pallet,

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you might notice that it takes up a lot of space which nobody likes.

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In fact, you could continue to dock more pallets next to the others.

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Let's open the layer's property manager pallet.

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It's one of the pallets that's not in the view tab, it's over on the home tab.

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So we'll need to go there.

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We'll dock it next to the properties pallette.

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Just those two dock pallets effectively take up half of our editor with pallets.

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Notice that when the pallet is docked,

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the sidebar moves to the top.

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Let's undock it by pulling it away from the top bar.

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For now, let's close the layers pallette.

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There's a great solution for this space problem though.

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Remember the second icon on the now relocated sidebar,

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click on it to turn on the auto hide feature.

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Your property's pallet will shrink up to a small

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vertical bar instead of displaying the entire pallet.

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Now, all you have to do is roll your mouse over the hidden pallet to make it display.

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As long as your mouse is within the pallet, it will continue being displayed,

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remove the mouse focus to make it hide again.

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Maybe you want to float your pallet again. It's quite easy.

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Roll over the collapse pallet. The sidebar is also displayed in the state

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just left, click the sidebar and keep holding down the button.

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Now drag it off to somewhere else.

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Notice that once you move your mouse away from the pallet,

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it will auto hide since that feature is still selected.

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Now, some people like floating auto hiding pallets, I'm not one of them.

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If that's you too,

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either click on the auto hide icon or right click the sidebar and uncheck auto hide.

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Let's do that. Now,

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while we're talking about dragging to dock a pallet,

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so far, we've focused on the left side

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and every sidebar has been left

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you can drag a left sidebar, pallet to the right side.

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And when it gets close enough, the sidebar will switch sides.

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This goes in both directions. Of course,

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let's go back to the next two items in the pallet's properties. Pop up. Menu.

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Anchor left and anchor right are really just shortcuts

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to what we've done by dragging and dropping.

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Like the drag method though,

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allow docking has to be on in order to use these tools.

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Notice also that auto hide is currently turned off.

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When you click on anchor, left,

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the pallet anchors itself to the left side in a collapsed state.

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So it's also a shortcut to manually turning on auto hide.

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The other thing that makes docked or anchored pallets so appealing

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is that when they are collapsed into their hidden state,

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they will stack on top of each other.

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Let's open up a few other pallets and anchor them

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so that you can see how valuable this can be.

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We'll start by re anchoring properties this time to the right

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and by using the anchor right tool.

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Next, let's use sheet set manager. Go back to the view tab to display it.

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We'll anchor it left.

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Next comes the blocks pallet. It too will anchor left.

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Notice how the hidden pallets stack with the most recent on the bottom.

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Let's do the X

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palette. Next

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anchor it left also.

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Now we have three on the left. Let's put one more on the right.

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How about the count palate.

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Let's anchor it on the right

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now. You have three left and two right

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in all. I have five pallets open and ready to use.

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Taking up an absolute minimum amount of screen space.

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There's one more tool in the properties pop up that you need to know about.

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For this one, let's use the layers pallette.

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I'll click on the home tab to get to it

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to better demonstrate this next feature.

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Let's draw a line from somewhere above the layer's pallette to somewhere below it.

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Similar to what I've done here.

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Basically, we want the pallet to cover up part of the line. Now, right?

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Click on the sidebar to get the properties pop up,

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make sure auto hide is turned off and then select transparence.

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Now we'll see the transparency dialogue.

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This is a very handy feature

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by default pallets are solid.

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You can set these independently or the same,

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but you can't set the rollover transparency to be less than the general setting.

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We'll set both to 50%.

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By the way, the click,

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the preview button is a bit of a relic as

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the pallet will update its transparency settings in real time.

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So you should now be able to see the line we just drew behind the pallet.

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The final thing to know about are the two check boxes at the bottom.

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If you want these settings to apply to all pallets,

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check the top one,

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the bottom check box will disable all pallet transparency

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when you click it, you'll see that the transparency sliders are now disabled.

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If that's not what you want, uncheck it

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to end this video,

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I'll choose not to save my transparency changes by

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clicking cancel and then I'll close the layers palette.