CAD: Untie Your Favorite Commands from the Map 3D 2010 Ribbon ...

We look at ways to make finding your commands in the Ribbon environment easier.

Here at Kung Fu Drafter we have secret identities. By nights and weekends we are sexy, witty bloggers providing thought provoking posts to an avid audience. We adored by the public and stalked by blog groupies. By day we are mild mannered CAD professionals providing quality plan sets and technical support. Our days are meticulously managed and our training is golden. It’s a difficult existence leading a dual life of drafting and writing. But hey, someone has to do it.

The Map 3D 2010 ribbon ...One of the most common calls we have get has to do with the recent transition Autodesk has taken to incorporate the contextual ribbon Map 3D 2010. It seems there are quite a few users out there that are either hesitant to migrate to a ribbon environment or simply having trouble doing it. If you find yourself saying “Hey, that’s me” then go on reading.

Autodesk has provided a nifty tool to make the transition to a ribbon environment easier, the Ribbon Command Locator. With this little gizmo you will be able to navigate through the new 2010 ribbon environment to find the command you seek.

To open the Ribbon Command Locator:

1. Either enter the “Help” command or click on the “?” in the upper right hand corner in the InfoCenter.
2. The Help screen will open as a separate window.
3. To the right there will be a grey sidebar labeled as “Quick Links”.
4. Halfway down the sidebar you will find the link for "Ribbon Command Locator".

Click here to see the Ribbon Command Locator ...

Once you have opened the Ribbon Command Locator you will be shown the menubar from the Map 3D 2009, depending on the workspace selected. Use the familiar menubar to navigate to the command needed. After selecting the needed command there will be a path displayed below the menu bar. That is the path to the needed command in the new Ribbon. If the selected command is not available via the ribbon the Ribbon Command Locator will display an alternate method of accessing that command.

As effective as the Ribbon Command Locator is it is only of use to commands executed from the previous menubar. Unfortunately commands located in previous toolbars are not listed in the Ribbon Command Locator.

Learn more about Map 3D 2010 ...There is another option to this issue. To display the menubar from previous versions as part of the CAD environment enter “Menubar” at the command line and change the system variable to “1”. This display the menubar above the new ribbon until the system variable is returned to “0”. We do not recommend this method as it fosters the resistance to progress on with the evolving environment of Autodesk products. Still, there are sometimes those situations when you have to do the things you have to do to get the work done.

In the near future we will look at some similar solutions to this one for other Autodesk 2010 products like Civil 3D 2010. If you provide tech support for clients or coworkers leave us a comment. We'd love to hear what some of the common issues you deal with are and what solutions you have for them. As for us it seems like we always have more issues than solutions ...

- KFD - 

Comments

[Grant]

It seems the distance between Google technologies and Autodesk's 3D max and others are getting smaller and smaller, this is great for us developers and 3D modelers!

[Kung Fu Drafter]

We completely agree. It wasn't until just recently that we came to understand how powerful Google's offerings were. There may be a post coming up soon concerning this very topic.

Thanks for the comment!

- KFD -