From the course: AutoCAD 2025 Essential Training

Utilizing the Quick Access Toolbar (QAT) in AutoCAD - AutoCAD Tutorial

From the course: AutoCAD 2025 Essential Training

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Utilizing the Quick Access Toolbar (QAT) in AutoCAD

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- [Instructor] As per the previous video in this chapter, we're keeping the interface.dwg file open in AutoCAD. Now, in this video, we're going to check out the Quick Access Toolbar, or QAT for short. It's over in the top left part of your AutoCAD screen. So, previously we looked at the Application menu with the red A and the flyout Here. What we're going to do is move along from here and look at these icons here. This is the Quick Access Toolbar. So, you'll notice here I can open up a new blank drawing file, I can open up an existing drawing file, I can save a current drawing, or I can save as with a different file name. Now, something that made me smile recently is save and save as still have the little 3.5 inch diskette icon, which is kind of null and void nowadays. A lot of the time we're saving to our machine, we're saving to devices, we're saving to the cloud, we don't save to disk anymore, but traditionally that little disk icon represents saving or save as for your files. Moving along, we can open from web and mobile. With your AutoCAD subscription, you get some web and mobile cloud space. You can save your drawings there and open them from the cloud as well, and that's the save to web and mobile icon right there. We can also plot our drawings to a plotter, a printer, or an electronic file, such as a PDF. And we've also got the traditional undo and redo there as well. Now, these are incredibly useful. If I click on the down arrow, you'll notice there I can go back however many commands I've obviously committed to in this particular drawing. So, if I did something like a move command, or a pan command, or something similar, let me just hit Escape. If I right click and did a Pan, for example, and I just panned around the drawing a little bit like that using the Pan tool, and then it's a right click and Exit again, you'll notice now when I click, can you see I've got Pan there? And I can go back to options or what they call Intellipan, which I used earlier, and so on. So, I can undo a group of commands or just one command if I want to. Now, the redo is the same, but I haven't got anything to redo yet, hence, it's grayed out. Now, there's a funny little symbol on the Quick Access Toolbar, this one here. For those of you that remember tapes and CDs, it looks like an eject symbol. And if you click on it, it does kind of eject the customized Quick Access Toolbar menu. It's kind of clever. Now, you'll notice on the customized Quick Access Toolbar menu, there's a group of commands that are ticked. Those are all the icons that are displayed currently on the Quick Access Toolbar. So, if I selected Layer from that list, I now get the Layer dropdown where I can look at all the layers in my AutoCAD drawing. So, you can see there, it's just a Layer dropdown, I can go in, manipulate my layers in the drawing, and so on. When I click on the arrow again, goes back up into the Quick Access Toolbar. Now, if I want to get rid of that again, I just click on the little what I call eject symbol. Click on Layer again, and you'll see that Layer dropdown then disappears. So, you can customize the QAT, the Quick Access Toolbar, to your heart's content if you wish. You'll also notice as well if I click on that dropdown again, I can move the Quick Access Toolbar around. I can access more commands, I can show the menu bar, and I can also show below the ribbon. Now, the menu bar is an old legacy tool in AutoCAD, Show Menu Bar. And you can see there now, I've got File, Edit, View, Insert, and so on. This is what we used to have in older versions of AutoCAD before we had the ribbon. So, if I click on Format, can you see there? I'm getting all the dropdown menus that I would've had in older versions of AutoCAD. So, if I click on that little fly out there again and I can hide the menu bar like so, can you see it disappears again? The other thing I can do is I can move the Quick Access Toolbar below the ribbon. There it is there like that. Click on the flyer again, move it above the ribbon. So, I can relocate it if I want to tweak the interface a little bit. And last but not least, you've got a Share tool. Now, that Share tool is where you can share a drawing, the current version of the drawing, using AutoCAD Web, that other part of your AutoCAD subscription. That will also include any external reference files that are linked to this particular DWG file. So, you can see the Quick Access Toolbar has a lot of functionality for something quite small and insignificant on your AutoCAD screen. Again, check it out, see whether you can set it up and set up tools and commands on there that you can utilize on a daily basis to your advantage when you're working with AutoCAD.

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