- [Narrator] We're staying in our interface.DWG file.
And what I want to just take you through
very, very quickly, is the difference between
an AutoCAD palette,
and an AutoCAD dialogue box.
Now dialogue boxes are a standard feature
of the Windows Operating System,
and there's many, many dialogue boxes that you'll use
when you're using AutoCAD,
because AutoCAD is running on that Windows Operating System.
But AutoCAD also has these things called pallettes.
Now there's lots of different pallettes available.
If you go to the View tab on the ribbon,
there's all these different pallettes
that you can use here, for example.
Now I'm not going to go into all of those right now.
What I'd like you to do is go back
to the Home tab on the ribbon, and we'll open
up a specific palette that we're going to use quite a lot.
And that's the Layer Properties Manager.
So it's Home tab on the ribbon Layers panel here,
and click on Layer Properties.
And this will show you all of your layers
in this particular AutoCAD drawing.
And you can see they're all different colors
all different line types, different line weights
different names and so on,
but I'm not worried
about the actual content of the Layer Properties Manager,
what I want to get across is
that the Layer Properties Manager is a pallette,
and it's kind of a programmable space
that the AutoCAD developer's use.
So I can search for a Layer up here,
in the pallette, for example, I can go to the Settings
of the pallette as, as well,
you'll notice there's all my Layer Settings.
I can also dock the Layer Properties Manager.
So I can click and drag,
and dock it over here to the left,
and can you see it docks now?
And it's fixed over here
on the left-hand side of my drawing area in AutoCAD.
I can click and drag on the Title bar again,
and drag it back out again and release,
And then it'll come back into the screen
as a floating pallette, like so.
I can also click on this little funny icon here
Auto Hide, that will hide all the contents
of the pallette, and then when I hover over the Title bar
they come back again and I can go and work in the pallette.
If I click on that Auto Hide icon again,
it's not auto hidden anymore,
it just stays there,
like it does on the screen when you first open it.
So, the Layout Properties Manager is an AutoCAD pallette,
and it has different bits of functionality.
If I right click on that Title bar as well,
you'll see that I can anchor it to the left or the right.
I can control the transparency of the pallette.
I can switch Auto Hide on and off.
I can allow docking.
I can close it, change the size of it,
and move it around as well.
So if I just hit Escape a couple of times,
that'll lose that menu,
and then I can click on the little cross here
and that will close the Layer Properties Manager palette.
Now a dialogue box is just a standard Windows dialogue box,
like I said, there's loads of them within Windows
and Windows-based applications, including AutoCAD.
If I go to the Insert tab on the ribbon
this is all where we all start working with things like
blocks and references and so on,
and importing information into AutoCAD.
But if we go to the Block Definition panel
and just click where it says, "Create Block"
and click on the little sort of down arrow,
the little fly out triangle,
and you can see we've got a couple
of commands coming off of that fly out menu,
just click on "Create Block",
and that will open up the Block Definition dialogue box.
So now you can see the difference.
A dialogue box,
I can move it around, no problem.
I click and drag on the Title bar.
The Title bar, in a dialogue box,
is always horizontal like that.
A pallette it's always vertically down one side,
like it was in the Layer Properties Manager.
And you'll notice with these, I can't dock them.
They just kind of drift away off the screen,
they're not dock-able either.
So that's a regular Windows dialogue box,
and you've got buttons that can click on.
These are called radar buttons.
These are called tick boxes
and you've got input boxes, and so on.
You can also put descriptions in like text fields as well.
And that describes the Block with some text.
You can give it a text description if you need to.
I'm not going to create a Block,
I'm going to click on Cancel,
but it just gives you a quick heads-up
as to what the difference is.
So, something like the Layer Properties Manager
in the Home tab on the ribbon is a pallette.
And then if you go to the Insert tab
and start creating blocks,
the Block Definition dialogue box
is a regular Windows-based application dialogue box.