Working with the AutoCAD ribbon and panels - AutoCAD Tutorial

- [Instructor] Staying in our interface.dwg file, and we're going to take a look now at the AutoCAD ribbon and AutoCAD ribbon panels, and how they work. So the ribbon is normally located at the top of your AutoCAD screen. Now, by default, it will open in the Home tab. You do have lots of other tabs. You have the Insert tab, the Annotate tab, the Parametric tab, the View tab. You've got Manage, Output, Collaborate, and if you're running with full AutoCAD, not AutoCAD LT, you can also work with the AutoCAD Express tools. So there's lots of different tabs in the ribbon. I'll click back on the Home tab. Now, you'll notice that the ribbon is divided into specific panels. So if you're drawing something, you would use the commands in the Draw panel here. If you're modifying geometry or objects, you would use the Modify panel here. If you're working with annotations, such as text and dimensions, you might use the Annotation panel here. Now, each of these panels has a specific use. So when you go to the Annotate tab on the ribbon, you're working with text, dimensions, center lines, leaders, tables, markups and annotation scaling. So there's lots of different tools on each of the tabs on the ribbon. Again, jump back to the Home tab on the ribbon. Now, I just want to show you how some of the functionality works within the ribbon so that you're used to it, and then obviously it builds up that muscle memory so that you remember how these things work. I'm going to utilize the Home tab on the ribbon and the Draw panel here, top left. Now, you'll notice each of these commands has a little icon that goes with it normally, but notice there are flyouts underneath some of the commands. So for example, if I click on the flyout underneath Circle, there's lots of different circle types that you can place in AutoCAD. Same with Arc, if I click there, lots of different arc types that you can use within AutoCAD. I'll leave it up to you to investigate how they all work, but that's how you work with the ribbon. You click on the flyout to expand the command functionality. Now, if I click on the title bar, you'll see that also it expands the panel as well. There's a little pin, click on the pin, that holds that expanded panel out until you click on the pin again and unpin it, and it goes back into the ribbon again. So that's how you work with the ribbon tabs, the ribbon panels and all the flyouts on the ribbon. Now, there's one more little trick I want to show you here, and a lot of new users to AutoCAD absolutely freak out when this happens because they think that they've broken AutoCAD. You haven't, there's a little white button just there at the top of the ribbon. Can you see it there? With a little up arrow on it. What that does is it takes you through different displays of the ribbon in AutoCAD. So if I click on it once, the ribbon changes. Now, it hasn't broken AutoCAD. If I hover over Draw, there's Draw, there's Modify, I've still got the ribbon tabs along the top. If I click on that little white button again, (laughing) it kind of disappears even more. There's Draw, there's Modify, there's Annotation, there's the ribbon tabs there. Click on it one more time and people freak out even more because it seems to have disappeared even further. It hasn't, they're there, look. There's Home, there's Insert. Click on it, there's the Home, there's the Insert, there's the Annotate. One last click, and it takes me back to the default view of the ribbon. So I'll click on the Home tab again. All you got to do with that little white button is, if you click on it by mistake, just keep clicking. There's four different settings to the ribbon. You will get back to the default one that you can see on the screen if you just keep clicking methodically and keeping an eye on what the ribbon does.