Managing your AutoCAD User Interface - Toolpalettes

Following on from my previous post, here's an overview of how I go about managing AutoCAD's Toolpalettes at an enterprise level, over a network for multiple users.

As mentioned in my previous posting "Managing your AutoCAD Interface", this is how I manage Toolpalettes at an enterprise level, that's not to say that this is how it should be done, just how I do it. If anyone reading this has some other good ideas, please share, I am always interested in alternatives, and everything I do has been learnt over the years from someone else.

The Toolpalettes

The Toolpalettes are (in my opinion) the easiest way to provide customized content to users. They are easy to customize, using a drag-and-drop process for building palette content. I can add, change, remove content from the toolpalettes as I am undertaking other work tasks.

The Toolpalettes also provide the user with the facility to group the Toolpalettes, however this does not help us at an enterprise level, as Toolpalette grouping is saved in the users local profile.

What I have done is manage the Toolpalettes independently, what I mean by this is, not setup toolpalettes or grouping integrated with my workspaces, but rather provide users with an additional toolbar which facilitates the swapping of Toolpalette sets.

I setup these enterprise Toolpalettes on the network, in a read-only location.

Example

The easiest way to show how it's all done is to run through the process of creating the Toolpalettes and Toolbar, so here goes... (and I appreciate that the order in which I am doing this is highly unlikely to be exactly what you need to do, but I am sure you can adapt the procedure to suit)

Create your Toolpalettes

1. Create the folder locations for your Toolpalettes.
    I generally have a "Toolpalettes" sub-folder setup on the network, under my primary network CAD support folder (in this case sitting on my mapped S: drive)
    (I have preceded the folder name with "!_" only to force the folder to the top of the folder order for this example)

   

2. Start AutoCAD, turn your Toolpalettes off and open your options dialog
    In the options dialog, set the Toolpalette path to you Toolpalette folder location, in this example "S:\CAD\!_ToolPalettes\ToolPalette1" as shown below

   

3. Turn the Toolpalettes on, you will see a new empty Toolpalette, as shown below

   

4. You will also see that the Toolpalette support files have been created in the folder location...

     

5. You just repeat the above process for each Toolpalette you want to create.

    So that's the Toolpalettes created, I'll follow-up in my next post to show how to setup a toolbar to swap between the toolpalettes.

Comments

[Henry van den Boogaard]

We have stored our toolpallets on the server in m:toolpallets

When there are working two people at the same time in the same toolpallet any changes are not saved.
Does anyone Know why not ?

[John Benstead]

Hi Henry

Thank you for your recent comment.

When a toolpalette is displayed in AutoCAD, the toolpalette is cached in the local users profile for that AutoCAD session.

Any changes that are made to the toolpalette are then saved back to the original .atc files on closing AutoCAD or swapping to a different toolpalette set, as described in my other posting “Managing your AutoCAD User Interface - Toolpalette Swapping”

If 2 users are simultaneously making changes to the toolpalettes, then the last person to exit the toolpalettes or AutoCAD will have their changes saved, however I have noted that sometimes this does not happen and all changes are sometimes lost.

I would suggest that your network toolpalettes are read-only for all your users, and you setup a copy of the toolpalettes in a secure “development” location for editing by one person (yourself).

As you make changes to the toolpalettes in this secure development location, you can then copy out to your users “read-only” location when the changes are approved.

[jean]

What exactly has to be copied from the secure location? The AcTcatalog.atc and the Palettes folder and all its contents or just the atc file?

[John Benstead]

Hi Jean

Thank you for your recent comment.

Yes, everything has to be copied... the "AcTpCatalog.atc" file and all associated sub-folders and their contents.

I generally store all my Toolpalettes in one top level folder location, and then replicate the toolpalettes to my production network location overnight, using Robocopy.