- [Instructor] Once again,
we're staying in our interface dot DWG file.
We're going to take a closer look now
at the ribbon and the panels available to you in AutoCAD.
Now these run all the way
along the top of your AutoCAD application window.
So here's the ribbon in its default setup
and you can see there's all the tabs.
We've got home insert, annotate, and so on.
And as I click on each one
you can see all different ribbon panels
with lots of different icons in each one.
You'll notice I can even go to the app store
if I want to.
Most of the time you will be working
in the home, insert and annotate tabs of the ribbon.
I'm going to go back to the home tab in this particular case.
And you can see that we've got things like the draw panel
where we draw things
and the modify panel where we modify things.
Now you'll notice a lot of the icons
and the title bars of the panels on the ribbon
have these little triangles.
That's known as a fly out menu.
So if I click there
on that little triangle for the draw panel
you'll see there's more commands available in the ribbon.
I click on the little pin, like so,
it pins open the little fly out menu.
It's often known as a dropdown menu as well.
So if I unpin that now
you'll see that that goes back into the ribbon.
It's also the same with the commands
on the panels in the ribbon as well.
So for example, the circle command.
If I click on the triangle
there's all the different circle commands.
There's all the different art commands
and so on and so forth.
So you can do that all the way across the ribbon.
Now, one thing that you might do purely by accident
is click on this little white button here
with the up triangle.
If you click on that
it changes the appearance of your AutoCAD ribbon.
So you'll see that the appearance changes
each time I click on it.
And if I keep clicking
come back again to the default setting
of the ribbon, like so.
So you'll notice that obviously you can alter
the look and the feel of the ribbon if you want to.
For the purposes of this course though
we will using be the default ribbon
as you can see it on the screen at the moment.
Now, one more thing regarding our ribbon panels
that's really clever in AutoCAD.
AutoCAD over the years
has been designed, developed and worked on by Autodesk.
And it works a lot of the time now
in a dual screen environment.
A lot of us have two screens connected to our computer.
So wouldn't it be nice
if I could move some of my more commonly used ribbon panels
to a different screen.
And then I use the other screen
purely for all of my Autocad drawing area, for example.
So if I click on the title bar of the draw panel,
click and drag,
I can bring out what is called a sticky panel, like so.
That means that I've got all my draw tools available to me
even if I'm in something like the annotate tab.
So I might be annotating quickly
and working on some dimensions
or I need to draw a line quickly.
So I don't have to go all the way back
to the home tab anymore.
And you'll notice the draw panel is in the drawing area.
It's not up here on the ribbon anymore.
So that particular draw panel is there
And I can use it at any time,
'cause it's in my drawing area.
I can even move it across onto another AutoCAD screen
that I might be using in a dual screen setup.
I could also potentially drag and drop the modify panel
down there as well.
I've then got all my modify tools.
Now bear in mind, things like the draw panel
and the modify panel you use every day on a daily basis.
So it might be really useful to have them sit in there
like sticky panels like that.
Now the good thing is you can return them
to the ribbon really quickly.
All you've got to do is hover over each panel
and you can see these little bars appear
and there's what looks like a little T shape
in the top right corner.
If I hover over that,
you can see it says return panels to ribbon.
If I click there, the draw panel disappears.
Do the same with the modify panel.
I click there, modify panel disappears.
But they don't go into the actual ribbon and tab
that you might be working on.
I might have been in the annotate tab.
It doesn't put the draw and modify panels
back into the annotate tab.
It knows to put them back at the beginning of the home tab.
There on the ribbon, there's the draw
and there's the modify back in our AutoCAD ribbon.
So those sticky panels can be really quite useful
if you need them.