So both these options have their own respective place for inserting blocks in a drawing. In the Tools palette a huge variety of blocks are available through a large number of tabs and you can also create custom tabs where you can save related blocks and specialized tools. The Tools palette is used when your design needs a large variety of blocks.
The Blocks palette is the best option when you have to use a moderate number of blocks in a drawing as you can sort and organize them in the Favorites tab. The Blocks palette can also be used to save the blocks on the cloud to be accessed anytime and when you are on the go. You can save those frequently used blocks in the Favorites tab and then locate them quickly for inserting. The Blocks palette is used when you want fast and easy access to some frequently used blocks in a design. Question: What are the fundamental differences between Blocks palette and Tools palettes? Are there any cons to Blocks palettes?Īnswer: These are two different methods of inserting blocks. It was renamed to Libraries tab in AutoCAD 2021 and the Favorites tab was also added to the palette.
The Libraries tab was present, but had the name “Other Drawings”. Why?Īnswer: The Blocks palette was introduced in AutoCAD 2020 and had 3 tabs. Question: My palette does not have a Libraries tab.
The following are some of the questions that were asked during the webcast and I hope that the answers will explain this new palette a little further. To have more working space available, you can also dock the Blocks palette to either side of the drawing window with the Auto-hide selected such that you can display it whenever you require it. As it is a palette, you can have the Blocks palette always open while working in the drawing. Note that the Blocks palette was introduced in AutoCAD 2020 and replaced the old fashioned Insert dialog box.
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If multiple tabs need to be protected, it is also possible to set the whole folder as read only which will protect every palette tab the folder contains.Thanks to those of you who attended my Webcast about how to easily locate and insert blocks and drawings into the current drawing using the enhanced Blocks palette in AutoCAD.Ĭlick here to view the on-demand recording. Start AutoCAD and investigate the tool palette, the protected tabs should now display a padlock symbol. This indicates that you cannot modify the tool palette beyond changing its display settings and rearranging the icons. If a tool palette file is set with a read-only attribute, a lock icon is displayed in a lower corner of the tool palette. Choose which palettes are to be protected and click read-only. Within the Palettes folder, the custom tool palettes will be present along with a unique handle suffix that AutoCAD has added. The path, version number and location will vary according to the version of AutoCAD. Locate the tool palettes file locations group. To check where AutoCAD stores its tool palettes, open AutoCAD's options menu and access the files tab. To protect the data, we need to set the file attribute to be read only.įor AutoCAD 2022 the location will be like the following:Ĭ:\Users\USERNAME\AppData\Roaming\Autodesk\AutoCAD 2022\R24.1\enu\Support\ToolPalette Tool palette data is saved as an external file in an XML format, with an ATC extension. In summary, protect standard content from breakages! In addition, we don’t want anybody to delete or add items to tool palettes accidentally. Custom tool palettes can represent hours of painstaking customisation and it is desirable to be able lock the tool palette so that others can’t modify it. A question I was recently asked by a senior AutoCAD user was How do we lock our AutoCAD tool palettes? Not actually locking the position, but to lock it so people can’t modify the items within the palette.