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I'm sure all of us understand the concept of a workbench. No matter what
project you may be doing, a good workbench will have of your tools with an easy
reach. AutoCAD allows us do the same thing with our interface. By setting up a
workspace we can have all the relevant tools available to accommodate whatever
type of work we may be doing. Now a workspace is a saved configuration of
interface elements. Generally speaking, you can set up the screen however
you like, and then you can save that as a workspace, such that you can restore
it again in the future. Now I really haven't made many changes to the current
workspace. I'm going to make one more, just so it looks a little bit more
different, and then we will Save it. I'm going to bring up another palette,
I'm going to come up to my View tab and click, and I'm going to move over and
select the DesignCenter palette. We can use this palette to extract elements from
existing drawings. We will be using this palette a little bit later in the
title. So I'm going to anchor this guy to the left
side of my screen. To do that I'm going to place my cursor over the mast, right
click and select Anchor Left. Now I have my interface set up in the way which
I like to work, so I'm going to Save this as a workspace. To do that, I'm
going to come down and click this gear, and I'm going to select Save Current
As from the menu. I'm going to call this workspace, Jeff's 2D workspace, and I
will click Save. Now think of it this way, workspaces can be
created for specific types of work. When I'm doing 3D drafting, I'm obviously
going to need different tools, than when I'm doing 2D drafting, and maybe if I'm
working on Dimensions, I'm going to need another set of tools. We can set up
the screen for each type of work that we do, and then we can save that as a
workspace, such that the next time we do that type of work, we can quickly restore
the workspace, and have all of our available tools.
Now AutoCAD gives us some default workspaces. Let's look at the 3D Modeling
workspace. To do that I'm going to come down and click the gear, and in the
menu, up of the top half, I can see all of the available workspaces. I'm going
to select 3D Modeling. As you can see this workspace is set up for
3-dimensional drafting, I'm going to come back down and restore my custom
workspace. Once again, I'm going to click the gear, I'm going to select Jeff's
2D workspace to restore it to my screen. By setting up custom workspaces, you can always
have your tools with an easy reach, no matter what you maybe drafting.