Michael’s Corner

Michael's Corner is a monthly publication written by Michael E. Beall, Autodesk Authorized Author and peripatetic AutoCAD trainer. Michael travels all over the USA, bringing his fantastic experience and great understanding of AutoCAD to his clients. Michael's Corner brings together many of the tips, tricks and methods developed during these training sessions for the benefit of all users.

Michael's Corner provides something for every AutoCAD user. Every month, a number of articles cover a wide range of topics, suitable for users at all levels, including "The Basics" for those just starting out. Essentially, the aim of Michael's Corner is to help all AutoCAD users work smarter and faster.

This month…

From the Vault

Originally published February 2007

Locking a Tool Palette

If you share tool palettes with others or you are the CAD Manager, you may be interested to know that you can lock palettes. In other words, the only thing you will be able to do to the items on the palette is change their display settings and/or rearrange them on the palette. This may also be useful if you simply want to retain the integrity of the palette(s) you have made yourself, just so you don't accidentally mess them up.

So here's what you do:

First, navigate to the location where your palette files (.ATC) are located. [Hint: Do NOT change this path; bad career move.] By default these files are located at… C:\Documents and Settings\<yourloginnamehere>\Application Data\Autodesk\AutoCAD 2007\R17.0\enu\Support\ToolPalette\Palettes.

Next, right-click on the name of the palette you want to lock, then click Properties to open the General tab for the Properties of that file.

Now, for the Attributes setting, check the box for "Read-Only", then click OK.

When you go back into AutoCAD and open the palette for which you made the Read-Only assignment, you will see a lock in the lower left corner.

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