Subtitles of the Movie

When working in a corporate environment and sharing your Tool Palettes, your Dynamic Blocks and any other AutoCAD content for that matter it's sometimes a good idea to actually lock that information down. Now I'm not saying that somebody's going to run off and steal your Tool Palette content or your Dynamic Blocks, for example. What I'm trying to say here is it avoids people editing things that they shouldn't be editing. Now, I'm not trying to call out the CAD police or anything like that, but if you've spent a lot of time setting up Tool Palettes, Dynamic Blocks and the like, it's always a good idea to lock that information down so it doesn't get changed in any way by someone unsuspectingly who might make a change and it has implications on other drawings for example. So here's our Blocks Palette here and you'll notice, look, it's got a little padlock at the bottom. This is a Read-only Palette. If I right-click on any of these Blocks and go to Properties you'll notice that all the Properties are locked down. I can't edit that information, it won't let me. I can't edit even the Source File. I can't edit any of that at all because it is a locked Palette. So how do you lock your Tool Palettes down like that? Well, it's actually very easy. What you're doing is you're utilizing Windows technology. Now when you utilize the Windows technology all you're doing is you're locking down the folder where the Tool Palettes are stored. Now that might be a Network location. In my case it's just the Default Autodesk location. So if I do an Alt-Tab now and just tab on through here to find my folder here, you'll see there's my Tool Palette folder there in the AutoCAD 2010 Support folder. So if I right-click over Tool Palette here like so and go to Properties, it'll give me the Properties of that folder. Now you'll see at the moment they are Read-only, so I'm now going to untick that and Apply that and I'm going to apply those changes to the folder and-or here, the sub-folder and files, the Palette sub-folder and these files here. So I'll OK that now, and then I'll OK it again in the Tool Palette Properties dialog box. I'll then minimize my folder here, but you'll notice it's still locked. Now the issue you have here is you must restart AutoCAD for this to take effect. It's a Windows variable that you've changed, so you need to reboot AutoCAD to see that change. So let's do that now. What we'll do, we'll close out AutoCAD first. To do that make sure that you've saved your drawing and then you can either go to the Application Menu here and you can Close All Drawings or the Current Drawing, or you can Exit AutoCAD here, or you can go up here to close the drawing, which is what I'm going to do here and then what I'm going to do is I'm going to click on this Icon here and close AutoCAD down. Now I'm not going to show you that on the screen. What I'll do is I'll close AutoCAD and then bring it back up to you. In true, here's one I prepared earlier fashion. Now you'll notice that because obviously Tool Palette information has been edited here, you'll see that BLOCKS has now gone down to the bottom. That's the one thing that you can't guarantee in AutoCAD is your Tool Palette order, like this. It can be edited using Macros and Programming, but if you just do it at a generic level you'll find that these tabs do sometimes move. There's our BLOCKS Palette again. Notice the Padlock isn't there, so I can now right-click and go to Properties now and you'll see now that obviously the information here can be edited again. So I can change a Layer color for example, to red, I can OK that, and it doesn't stop me doing it. I can right-click on it again, Properties, change it back again, so change it from the Red back to ByLayer and OK that again. So you can see I can edit the Properties of the objects of the tools on the Tool Palettes. So, that is a Windows variable that you're changing, like I said, so you will have to, once you've changed those settings in the folder, restart AutoCAD for those changes to take effect.