Give the AutoCAD Ribbon a Second Chance

Attention all you Ribbon Rebels! If you’re still fighting the ribbon and using the AutoCAD Classic workspace, it’s time to make a change! Join Lynn Allen as she shows you the advantages of moving to the ribbon as well as some tips on making the transition as easy as possible.

Video Transcript

Hello there, this is Lynn Allen. Thanks so much for joining me for another AutoCAD tip courtesy of the fabulous Cadalyst magazine. Hope you are having a great week.

Today I'm talking to the Ribbon Rebels. Oh, yeah, you know who you are. Oh, yeah, you love your pull down menus. You love your toolbars, and you are not about to change for the Ribbon. Okay, I want you to know I can appreciate that. I can relate. In AutoCAD 2009 when the Ribbon first came out, I was like, "Really? Why do I have to switch to a new UI?" I already knew where everything was. I was living happily ever after. I totally didn't get it.

But now a few releases later, that Ribbon is so darn smart, I can't live without now. I'm going to give you some reasons why you should move over to the Ribbon, and then I'm going to show you some ways you can make it easier on you. I don't have a 12-step program. I'm sure you would love it if I did. I'm going to show you some tips so you can make the  move over to the Ribbon too. I promise it's not as painful as you think it is.

So just to kind of start out with here -- why am I so into the Ribbon? For example, here I have a drawing, and I'm going to make some modifications to this -- I mean I don't even know what it is. It turns out it's a PDF. How do I know? Because the Ribbon is magic. It magically changed for me to only give me the commands that have to do with PDFs. I love that. See that saves me time. I don't have to search through the menus to try to find the commands that have to do with PDFs.

Let me give you another example. Let me zoom in a little bit here. If I come over here, and I select this hatch pattern, you will see the Ribbon automatically changes. Once again, saves me time and only gives me commands that have to do with hatching. Love that. I'm very lazy -- anything that is a few less steps for me is a beautiful, beautiful thing.

What else about the Ribbon? So if you are already on AutoCAD 2015, the Ribbon is really off the charts because they added in these things called galleries. I'm just going to go into the Insert command on the Ribbon, and you can see that all of the blocks from inside my drawing automatically are populated in these galleries. I didn't have to do anything. So if I want to insert this plant, all I have to do is grab that block and drag and drop it into place. You will find galleries all over the menu. You'll find the underneath Text Styles. You'll find them under Multi-leader Styles, Dimension Styles and so on. Very visual, very friendly -- makes my life easier.

If I've convinced you that you should give the Ribbon a try, let me help you through that process. So one of the reasons that you guys don't like the Ribbon is because you have to figure out where all the commands are. I'm going to give you a couple of tips. If you have AutoCAD 2014 or before, you can click that great big red "A" in the upper lefthand corner -- not twice, as we discussed in the last tip, but just once. And this big white space at the top, I'm going to type in a command that I can't find. We'll make it something like Hatch, that's easy. But I couldn't find it -- say that's the case. You will see that it will show you where in the Ribbon all the Hatch commands are. Love that. Easy. So that's one way to do it.

Now if you are on AutoCAD 2015, here's a really cool feature. Let's do the same thing. I'm going to go ahead and type in Hatch, and you will see that if I type it into the top screen there, it goes into the Help file. Here you'll find almost all of the Help functions and an option called Find. If I click on Find, it will switch me to the right menu and show me exactly where the command is. Okay, come on. It doesn't get any easier than that. Piece of cake.

So, be on my team. Be with me. I'm going help you through this. You can make the move over to the Ribbon. I promise you, you will be so glad that you did. Thank you so much for joining me, and I'll see you back here in two more weeks.