Working with the AutoCAD ribbon and panels - AutoCAD Tutorial

- [Instructor] We're staying in the interface.dwg file, and we're going to take a look at another part of the AutoCAD interface. Now, it's probably the most fundamental part of the AutoCAD interface as well. It's the ribbon at the top of the screen. Now the AutoCAD ribbon contains all the commands that you need to run AutoCAD on a daily basis, and the ribbon itself is right up at the top of the screen just underneath the application menu and the quick access toolbar. So it's this kind of grayish area here with all these icons on it. Now the ribbon itself is broken down into tabs. So you've got the Home tab, the Insert tab, Annotate, Parametric, and so on. Now this may vary depending on which version of AutoCAD you're using. I'm using full AutoCAD 2025. AutoCAD LT actually is like a smaller version of full AutoCAD, and it's 2D primarily only, so it's 2D drafting. You can do 3D drafting in full AutoCAD as well. There's a lot of other bits of functionality that come in full AutoCAD and aren't available, obviously, in LT as well. And it's like a sort of, what I call a smaller version of. Obviously there's a cost implication. Full AutoCAD is more expensive than AutoCAD LT. However, the ribbon will be different between full AutoCAD and AutoCAD LT. There'll be a different number of tabs at the top of the screen there. Now, basically, the ribbon itself, like I said, controls AutoCAD. So this is where you drive AutoCAD. It's like your dashboard, or in essence if you're driving a car, it's like where you're looking at the steering wheel and looking at the controls of the car. Now we've got a drawing open already, and I'm not going to jump into any commands. What I'm going to do here is jump into the workflow of how the ribbon works itself. Now it's very easy. Basically, you jump into the tab that you want. So there's the Home tab. I could go to the Insert tab, I can go to the Annotate tab. We're going to use the Home tab in this instance. And what I'm going to do is just show you how these panels on the ribbon actually work. So you go to the tab first, then you've got the panels. Now the panels are divided, so we've got the Draw panel, we've got the Modify panel, we've got the Annotation panel, and so on. Now, if I wanted to do some drawing in this drawing, what I would do is work with the icons here in the Draw panel, but I can expand the Draw panel, you'll notice, and I can pin it open because there are more command icons there on that flyout. So you can see there, once I've used those, I can then unpin it and it goes back into the ribbon itself again like so. Now that flyout arrow is available on some of the commands as well. So there's Circle. If I click on that flyout arrow, there's all different types of circles. If I go to Arc, different types of arcs. If I go up here, you've got rectangle and polygon and so on. You've also got different types of ellipses, and here you've got different types of hatches, for example. So they're all different draw tools that you can utilize. And that's really handy because what that allows you to do is it allows you to work with all the draw tools at any given time. You can also drag the Draw panel, click and hold on the title bar and drag. And you can make it into what I jokingly call a sticky panel, like a sticky note, like a Post-it note. And that now sits in your drawing area. Or if you're using a dual monitor setup, you could put it on a different monitor as well, for example. Now, obviously, I can still work with all the draw tools like so, but I can also jump to, say, the Annotate tab. And instead of having to go back to the Home tab to use draw tools here, I can use the Annotate tab and the draw tools at the same time. So I'm just customizing the interface a little bit there. Now if I want to get this Draw panel back into the ribbon, there's a little T-shaped icon just there. Can you see it? Return Panels to Ribbon. So I hover over the Draw panel, these sidebars appear, click on the little sort of T-shaped icon there. Go back to the Home tab now, and my Draw panel is back. So that's how quick and easy it is to work with all of these different panels and icons on your tabs on the ribbon. Now there's one more little tip I want to show you here that quite often freaks people out when they're first using AutoCAD. There's a little white button just here, can you see that one? Minimize to Panel Buttons. If you click on it, each time you click on it, the appearance of the ribbon will change. It's that little white button with the up arrow. Click there, click again. Click one more time, and you're back to the original ribbon configuration. So if you ever click on that little white button there with the arrow on it, don't panic, just keep clicking and you'll get back to your default ribbon configuration again. But that's pretty much the ribbon as it is in AutoCAD and AutoCAD LT. That's where you drive your AutoCAD from. All those commands on the AutoCAD ribbon.