Subtitles of the Movie

AutoCAD 2010 now has enhanced Ribbon Tools on the Ribbon Interface. The Ribbon Interface first came into being with AutoCAD 2009 and as you can see there have been Ribbon enhancements in AutoCAD 2010. You can see there for example the Panels are now color-coded. You can highlight them in the blue like so to see which Panel you're using. The Icons are also color-coded as well with a pale blue. So you can easily see where you're going on the Ribbon Interface. Now the new features of the Ribbon are extremely useful. How many times have you been using the Ribbon in, say, AutoCAD 2009, or even AutoCAD 2010 and you realize that you want to perform a Command that isn't on your current tab. So, for example, I'm in the Home tab at the moment and I've got my Draw Panel here, but I might want to draw something, let's say a line, like so, and I confirm that line there, and now I want to go and do something different. So, what I would do here is I might want to annotate and put some text on top of that line. But then you suddenly realize, oh, I need another line, let's say, so I've got to go back here to the Home tab, like so, and then draw a line again. It can be a little bit disjointed and you're sort of jumping around from panel to panel. One of the new features in the Ribbon is Sticky Panels. Now as Lynn Allen from Autodesk would say: Screen real estate is always at a premium with AutoCAD. You always need as much screen space as possible. So instead of flipping from tab to tab, I hover over the Draw Panel, I left-click and hold the mouse button down and drag, and I can drag my Draw Panel off of the Ribbon and place it over here. Now, as you can see it sits there quite nicely now in the Drawing Area, which means I can go to my Annotate here, and I can still work with my Draw Commands. Now, the benefit of this is also as well, I can click here. See the little arrow there? That will provide me with the fly-out tools. Now obviously it's flicking them out to the left there because if it tries to flick them to the right they'll go off the screen. But if I hover over the Title Bar of the Panel it highlights still in blue, but look here: I've got two Icons. That will return the Panel back to the Ribbon. This Icon here, though, is Toggle Orientation. If I click on that you'll see the Title Bar of the Panel goes to the bottom and if I click on the fly-out now, you'll see they come out to the bottom there, like so. So, you can either have the fly-out going to the side or to the bottom. Now, you'll notice I'm not in the Home tab here, at the top of the screen, I'm in the Annotate tab on the Ribbon. It doesn't matter. I can still hover here and return to the Ribbon, it disappears. OK. where's it gone? I go back to the Home tab and it's back in place where it should be on the Ribbon Interface on the Home tab. So, as you can see I can place these anywhere I like on the screen, like I've just done, go to any tab that I want to, let's say Manage, I can then hover here and go Return to Ribbon, and it drops it back into the Ribbon, but in the right tab. Extremely useful. It's drag and drop technology at its best in AutoCAD 2010. It makes your life so much easier. Now, what we can also do now, which we couldn't do in previous versions of AutoCAD is we can undock the Ribbon and use it like, for example, a Palette, or a Toolbar. You go up to the Title Bar here: can you see where it says Express Tools and output the tabs there? It's the Tab Title Bar of the Ribbon. I right-click there, I undock on the Shortcut Menu and lo and behold my Ribbon now is floating around on the screen. So, those of you that used to use the Dashboard in AutoCAD 2008, does that look familiar? I still get the fly-outs, I click on the little arrows here, and the good thing is, I can Auto Hide the Ribbon by clicking here, so now when I move away all I've got is the actual Ribbon Panel like that, here, and as I move away it auto hides. I switch Auto Hide off and it's back again. And the good thing is, I can just drag it like a toolbar around the screen. If I move up toward the top you'll see it goes horizontal, release the mouse button, and it docks the Ribbon back where it used to be in the first instance. So as you can see, much enhanced Ribbon Tools in the Ribbon Interface.