A Tip from Kuala Lumpur

It's a beautiful day in Malaysia (although it did rain VERY hard for a bit).  Today I had two press interviews to discuss the world of blogging.  Since I suspect they will be perusing my blog tonight as they write up their articles I thought it only appropriate to say "hello" to them.  So hello to Lee Chung Yen, who has promised to write a nice article about me for his Chinese magazine.  Of course, since I don't speak Chinese, it will be difficult for me to check up on that!  And another "hello" to my afternoon interviewers who interviewed me right by the beautiful Petronas Twin Towers of KL.  First to Oon Yeoh who suggested strongly that I permit comments in my blog (what do you think about that?  If I did would you all promise to be nice to me?) and Kashminder Singh who took many pictures of me (while I pretended not to notice).  All three of them also have personal blogs themselves which I find very interesting.  Apparently - every 3 minutes somewhere in the world a new blog is created.  Who knew?

So on to your promised tip...this one on customizing your tool palettes...(since I've been wrestling a bit with the new CUI preparing for my presentation tomorrow).

How to get toolbar buttons onto a tool palette (any release):

Right click on the tool palette and select "Customize".  Follow this up by dragging and dropping the desired toobar button to the tool palette.  If you have AutoCAD 2004 or 2005 you can also drag and drop any command from the Commands tab in the Customize dialog as seen below.  Do yourself a favor and scroll the left column down until it says "All commands" for a complete listing of all options.

How do I drag and drop a command from the command list to a palette in AutoCAD 2006?

Well that's a bit tougher in AutoCAD 2006...if the command you're after isn't already on a toolbar button you're going to have to do a little extra work.  You'll have to make a toolbar button out of the command first - and then drag and drop it to the palette as in earlier releases.  So that means you'll need to go into the CUI command and create a toolbar button with the desired command on it.  Exit the CUI (bummer that we can't just drag and drop directly from the new CUI to the tool palette).  Then right click on the palette and select Customize... just as you did in previous releases, followed by a drag and drop the tool from the toolbar to the tool palette.  Phew!

So there's a tip to start off your week...more to come...