Customizing Your User Interface: Part 1

Congratulations! You just installed your new Civil 3D 2008 Software! What's that you say? You can't find all those neat little tool bars you were using in your old Land Desktop 2005? Never fear, I'm here to help.

What's a workspace and why do I need one?

A workspace is your home. The place where you can hang your Thomas Kinkade prints and play all your favorite Donny Osmond records. This is where your toolbars and menus will show up. If your little sister comes in and messes up your menus, you can just re-select your workspace and everything will go back to where it belongs.

I strongly recommend starting your own workspace.

In your new workspace you can have all your Civil menus and toolbars and a few of your own if your wish.

To create a new Workspace, just click on the dropdown menu and choose Save Current As...

It will prompt you for a name of your new work space. Then click Save.

Your new workspace is now current. It takes on all the properties of whatever workspace you were in when you went to Save Current As...

To allow for further modification click on Workspace Settings.

While you are in the process of getting things to look the way you want, have Automatically Save Workspace Changes selected. Now you can re-arrange toolbars or add more from the ACAD group. The next time you fire up C3D, the menus and toolbars will remain in the location you put them.


Click OK and have fun redecorating your little workspace.







How do I make my very own toolbar in C3D from scratch?
Well, the nice people at Autodesk consolidated your menu files into one area. What used to be MNS and MNU files is now smooshed together in the CUI.

Select Customise from the Workspace dropdown and you will see the following screen:


To answer this question in a quick and dirty manner, I will guide your attention to areas I and III.

First, you will want to set a workspace current. Preferably the one you created with your name on it.



In area I, find the category called Toolbars.

Click the plus sign to expand the category. Right-click on Toolbars and select New Toolbar...







Give the toolbar a name.

Cool?






Find the tool you want to add in area III. Drag and drop it onto your new toolbar. When you see the little blue triangle, it's okay to let go.


Keep adding to your toolbar to your heart's delight! Click OK when you are done.

In my next installment, I'll show you how to add macros and flyouts to your toolbars. If I'm feeling generous, I'll talk about menus too.

Have a frigging awesome weekend!