Customization: If You Can Imagine It, You Can Do It

RON RICKS: Well, hello, everyone. And thank you for taking the time to view this video. I appreciate it. This is "Customization. If you can imagine it, you can do it."

My name is Ron Ricks. Let me just start by telling you a little bit about myself. First of all, I have about 41 years experience working with civil infrastructure design and modeling and CAD production. That's my passion. I've been doing it for a long time. I really enjoy it.

During that 41 years, there was a few years that I was a corporate CAD manager of several users, about 80 users, CAD users. So I have experience in that part of it, of managing standards, and customization, and so on. I've been in the civil engineering world for all those years. I currently work for a civil engineering firm called Ayres Associates located in the Fort Collins, Colorado office. Our headquarters are in Wisconsin.

I have my email address up here because I want to make sure that you guys, if you ever have questions or would like to get some of the content of things that I demonstrated here, that you can send me an email and I'll do what I can to get you the things that you would like.

I love the outdoors as many of you do. It's a great place to be, and to do things, and to unwind. And I just love being outside. This is a picture of an area that's close to where I live in the beautiful Western United States.

The learning objectives. You've all seen this I hope and read them. That's why you're taking this class or viewing this video. I'm going to do everything in my power to stick to these learning objectives. I'm not going to go over them right now because you've probably read them two or three times but we're going to stick to this.

My hope is to help you see the possibilities and motivate you to give it a try, to give customization a try, and unleash the power of this significant and what I call an identifying brand of AutoCAD. And I really do mean when I say it in the slides and in the objectives and other places that, if you can imagine it, it's pretty likely that it can be done. So this is a recording that you're watching a video but if you ever have questions, just feel free to email me.

So a little disclaimer. I just want to make sure that you understand where my experience is coming from. I've spent my whole career in AutoCAD Civil 3D, and other platforms that are civil related. So I don't have any experience with Revit. I do have some InfraWorks experience but none with Revit, or Plant 3D, or other AutoCAD family platforms and so I'm not 100% sure what types of customization can be done in those platforms so my focus is going to be on AutoCAD Civil 3D just to make sure you understand that.

So the question. Why customization? Why is this such a big deal? Is it a big deal? Does it really benefit? Does it have value or is it just something fun to do? And I'm here to tell you that it is a big deal. It's a huge deal. Autodesk has invested a ton of money and resources into making customization a part of their product. So it does help. It does make things better.

So to kind of talk about that, let me go through this. So when I was a young teenager, my job for several summers was to move sprinkler pipe in large potato and wheat fields in Southeast Idaho. That was my job.

Man, was it hard work. You'd move, get up early in the morning, 4:00 in the morning, go out into a field, rain or shine, and move pipe. You'd pick up a pipe, move it 90 feet, put it down, go get another pipe, move it. I'd move up to 300 pipes a day. It was hard work.

And somebody, a good farmer or somebody, thought about that and thought, there's got to be an easier way to do this. And they did. They came up with an easier way. And when the advent of circular sprinkler irrigation wheel lines came into play, it changed everything for farmers. No longer did we need to go out and move the pipe. It was completely automatic and can do everything, irrigate a giant field entirely by itself. So it changed everything.

So that's an example. And the same thing can be said for the CAD and modeling world. You can ask yourself, is there a better, faster way to do this, to perform a task, complex or simple task. And the answer is probably yes, there is.

One of the big features AutoCAD has always been known for is the ability to customize. It's one of AutoCAD's great hallmarks. It's been part of AutoCAD since its inception. There's many ways to customize. And what you can do is only limited to your imagination. If you can imagine it, you can do it. And by taking advantage of these tools, you're going to increase productivity, quality, and consistency.

So why customize? Because it actually does increase productivity. It actually does improve quality and consistency. It's how you help your organization follow CAD standards, for example. It empowers you to use the technology your way.

This third item here, it makes your job easier, more fun, frees you up to spend more time on designing and innovating and less time picking and clicking through the technology. You can create your own tool and do what you want it or need it to do. As powerful as they are, you don't have to rely solely on the delivered tools. In fact, Autodesk encourages customization. They've given us the tools to do so.

Let me show you a quick example of that. I'm going to jump right into Civil 3D and show you a quick example. This is really simple, not anything complicated, but it was something I did because I was tired of the steps I had to go through to accomplish what I'm about to show you.

I want to be able to put some hatch pattern in this area right here. I've got a lot of lines in the way, the grid lines. And this is a Civil 3D file so this item right here is a Civil 3D profile view object. And as you know, these grid lines are buried somewhere in the style of this Civil 3D profile view.

And it's not as just as easy as turning off a layer by using the Layer Off command to quickly turn those off so that you can hatch this. So I wanted to create something that would turn that off. So I went up to the-- and I'm going to show you this later.

Let's go to Home. We're going to go to Manage. And I created a macro using the Action Recorder to turn those off quickly so that I could hatch. That's just an example. Another quick example is-- I'm going to open up another file here really quick.

I have this task that I've always had to do where I've got a large-- this is a plan and profile sheet as soon as it gets done loading here. And it's part of a large, big base map. And I'm inside of this sheet. And I go to a certain area. And I want to go to that same area in the big base map. Here's the big base map.

This is a survey file of this large project. It's about two miles long. And this is huge. There's a lot of stuff here. And where is this driveway, for example, that's in my plan view of my plan profile sheet? Where is that driveway in this large base map?

I could peck around here, and zoom, and pan, and try to find this, and get an idea of where it is. And it just became a nuisance. And I thought, there's a better way to do this to make this faster. So I created an app. It's in our ribbon. And I'm going to talk about ribbons later, how to create ribbons and add apps to them. But I created a tool here called Set the Zoom Window Limits.

So I'm inside of my sheet file. I want to look at this driveway inside of the base file that it exists. So I'm just going to simply define a window around that driveway. And then I'm going to go into my base file. And I'm going to pick this restore button that restores that same window zoom area. So it makes it a really quick way to get around and to find areas that are in large files. This is something I use all the time. It's a really, really valuable tool, really simple to create, but it saves tons and tons of time.

OK. Let's go back to the PowerPoint. So this list of what's available inside of Civil 3D AutoCAD that you can customize, the list is huge. There's a lot here. There's a lot of different ways you can customize. And I've tried to make this a comprehensive list. I may have missed a couple but this is most of them, if not all of them.

They're in alphabetical order. They're not in any kind of order of ease of use, or popular, or whatever. This is just an alphabetical order of all the different ways you can customize inside of AutoCAD Civil 3D. I color-coded them because the green represents tools that are easy. You could probably go home with just an hour or so kind of getting introduced to the tool. You can figure it out.

And you can create some customization using the tools that are available. The green are easy. The blue is a little bit harder. It requires maybe a little bit more research, a little bit more training but not too bad. The red, that's pretty extensive, requires some pretty extensive training and experience.

Now the good news is if you look at the last bullet there, other programming languages such as Visual Basic, .Net, JavaScript, or ActiveX, that's some pretty intense programming languages. And the good news is that talented people that already know how to do this, that are already trained in this type of programming, they've created tools already.

And that's where we're going to take a look at the Autodesk app store that has some of those tools already available. So you don't need to worry too much about learning those programming languages. You certainly can if you want to but it's pretty extensive.

So anyway, this is a big list. So what are we going to focus on today? There's no way we're going to cover everything on this list. So we're going to try to focus on these items, these next few slides that I'm going to just jump through really quick. And then we'll jump right in to Civil 3D AutoCAD and actually demonstrate some of these things.

We're going to talk about the action recorder. I kind of showed you that briefly. Going to show you how to create a macro using action recorder. We're going to talk about dynamic blocks. I love dynamic blocks. Powerful. It's where you add intelligence to a block and have it do more than just simply insert.

You can do things with the block once it's inserted. We're going to talk about tool palettes. This is a really big one. This is where you're going to use-- where you can use palettes to store tools and apps, and to load list routines, and to put settings, and the users on the other end, including yourself, you can just pick a button and it will do a bunch of stuff. So this is a really great customization area.

We're going to also talk about the customized user interface, the CUI. This is a really big one. We're going to spend a little bit of time in this. This is where you create toolbars, and ribbons, and quick access toolbars, and other things. So we'll spend some time in there.

I'm going to touch on LISP. I'm not going to train you how to do LISP. LISP was a programming language. It's been with AutoCAD for a long, long time. It's very powerful. It's very robust. And it's pretty easy to use. And you can use this to create some pretty fun tools to do exactly what you want. I'm going to show you an example for that.

We're going to touch on Dynamo. Dynamo was introduced not too long ago. It's relatively new but it's part of Civil 3D. It's really, really powerful. Not only can you create scripts to do basic AutoCAD stuff but you can also create scripts to do Civil 3D things like creating surfaces, or querying data, or just powerful scripts of automation that you can create.

You can go really crazy with this. I'm going to just demonstrate this. I'm not an expert at Dynamo. There's some great classes out there. And by the way, in the handout, there's going to be links to each one of these that will take you to detailed classes, either at an Autodesk University pass class or other videos that will go into detail of each one of these, more detail than I have time to go into here.

We're going to talk about something that a lot of people don't even know you can do. It's like, what, you can have multibutton mouses? And the answer is yes. You can purchase these. There's a lot of them out there with Corsair or it just slipped my mind but other manufacturers of mice that have multibuttons. And you can program those buttons so that when you pick that button, it will do a certain task. Really powerful and I wanted to show that to you. Then last, we're going to talk about the Autodesk app store and go into just a little bit of detail about what's available there and how exciting it is to go in there and see all kinds of different tools.

Let's jump in and take a look at each one of these. I'm just going to go back to Civil 3D AutoCAD here. And I'm going to jump back into this one. And we're going to actually create. We're going to start with the action recorder.

And this does exactly what it says. It records your actions. It's not a video recorder. It doesn't record your video. It just simply records your AutoCAD actions that you can then bring back and use later to cut back on steps. So I have this situation here.

Like I was saying before, the grid is in the way. I want to put some hatch in here. So I want to be able to turn that stuff off. So I'm going to create an action recorder, a really simple one, not a big deal but it saves some time, to turn those layers off so that I can hatch in this area.

And like I said, if I just used the regular Layer Off command or something like that and picked this grid, it's not going to turn it off because it's embedded inside of a Civil 3D style. So we have to go into the Layer command. So I'm going to do that. I'm going to hit Record here.

Once I'm in record mode of an action, a macro, get the little red there, this is not time sensitive. It's not recording. It's not based on time. All it does is simply record the actions that you do inside of AutoCAD. It records that. So I'm going to go in. And I'm going to drag this command line over here.

And since I'm recording, I'm going to now just type in the dash Layer command. I use dash because I don't want the dialog box to come up because I want to record my actions here. And I'm going to do freeze. And then I'm going to type in the layer names. And I know what those are because I wrote them down. Let me get to those really quick in my notes.

OK. So the layers here are c-prof-grade-e, comma, c-prof-grid-- let's see. What is that, fine-- comma. C-prof-grid-heavy. OK. That's what I'm doing. I'm just using the Layer command but it's recording what I'm doing.

So I'm going to hit OK. And I'm going to hit Enter again. And it freezes those layers. But it recorded what I did there. It recorded those actions. So I'm done. I can hit stop. Once I do, it brings up a little dialog box. And it gives you the opportunity to name that macro that you just created. I'm going to call it ProfGridFreeze.

And it also has a spot. It's telling you where it's going to store it. This is a folder path of where it's going to store this macro. You can change that in your options to store it anywhere you want, including on your server, so that others have access to these macros. So I'm just going to hit OK.

Now to save time, I've already created another macro called thaw. So let's just see how this works. Basically just thaws those layers. So I get thaw. Push play. Thaws those layers. Go back and hit Freeze. Push play. Freezes those layers.

Now I can add my hatch without having those grid lines get in the way. Then I can go back and run the macro to thaw. So pretty simple, pretty straightforward. This was a really, really simple task. But it gives you the idea of what you can do with action recorder. It can be pretty powerful and do a lot of things.

OK. We're now going to jump into dynamic blocks. This is one of my favorites. Really love dynamic blocks. Let's get this guy out of the way. Drag it up here. You can do some great things with dynamic blocks. And to show you a couple of examples, I'm going to load my ribbon or our company-- not ribbon. Our company tool palette.

We're going to talk about tool palettes later. This just gives me access to some of my dynamic blocks just to give you an idea of what can be done. The first one I'm going to show you is a match line. This is a dynamic block. It's a block but it's got some intelligence to it.

If I pick this, I've got a bunch of little grips here. One of them is to stretch out the match line to make it do what I want it to do. Another one is to rotate it, to get it in position of where I want it for this match line. Another one is the little dropdown that goes into different types of match lines, sheet only and so on. So that's a dynamic block.

Another one that's kind of cool is this corrugated pipe. This is just something that was driving me nuts. I want to create a corrugated pipe line that looks like a corrugated pipe that's going to be used in details and sections. And if I wanted to do that, this is what it looks like in section.

I've got all these different arcs. It's really a pain to create this. And then you've got to do an array to make it go across or just copy them a whole bunch of times. And I thought, you know what, there's a better way to do this. I'm going to create a dynamic block to this. I pick this. I pick this little grip and stretch it across. And it just draws my corrugated pipeline.

So that's another good one. One more we'll show you really quick, this is in our ribbon. We're going to talk about these ribbons later. I'm going to put in my little something that's pretty industry standard, these section bubble call outs. But I turned it into a dynamic block to make it easy to work with.

Once it gets inserted, I've got grips that stretch out the arrow to go where I want it to go for where I'm cutting a section. I can pick this drop down and just have arrows if I want if I don't want the bubble. And then the other one that's kind of cool-- well, this one you can flip it back and forth where the arrows go.

And then the other one is this one. And as you can see, it rotates the sections based on what it is you're trying to cut a section of. But it keeps the bubble itself and the text in it horizontal to the screen. So really powerful. Dynamic blocks are really fun. A lot of things you can do with them. Those are just some examples.

Now I'm going to create one here. So again, I had an issue where I'm putting in the slope indicators. This is pretty standard practice for civil drawings. You've got a top of slope and a toe of slope. And you put in these indicators that tell the contractor this is a bank. You know, here's the top. It's sloping this direction and so on. Pretty common practice.

Everybody doesn't use those but it's pretty common practice in the civil world. Problem was is inserting those blocks, it was like a big pain. You'd have to insert it, snap nearest to the line, and then rotate it and zoom in close so that you could get it nice, and straight, and perpendicular with this toe of slope so it didn't look funny. Then you would have to draw a line and add that line, put it on the right layers. It was just kind of a pain.

I thought this has got to be an easier way to do this. So I thought, yeah, let's create a dynamic block. So I'm going to do that for you right now just to demonstrate how to do this. I've already got the objects that I need to create this block. It's just lines, and circles, and solid hatch. I'm going to type the BLOCK command.

Going to give it a name. I'm going to call it SlopeID. I'm going to pick a point, my insertion point of this block, just the standard method of creating a block. OK. I've got my block created. I've got everything ready.

But before I hit OK, I'm going to pick-- this is the key here. I'm going to open in Block Editor. You've got to do that. So turn that switch on. Hit OK. And it takes me-- I'm going to move this tool palette out of the way temporarily. Takes me into the block editor of this block I just created. And now I can do some things because I have this access to this palette here that has parameters and actions that can make this block dynamic.

So one of the first things I want to do is I'm going to pick this alignment parameter. And I'm going to snap to the same spot as the insertion point. The alignment, it says, OK, what is it you want to align it to? What's the direction of the alignment?

I'm going to turn on ortho. And I want it to be aligned with the top of this slope indicator. That's it. All of a sudden I've got a dynamic block because it's got some intelligence to it. But I want to add one more thing. I'm going to go to-- I'm going to add a point parameter. And I'm going to snap to the end of this point.

I added a parameter. Now I want to do an action to that parameter. So I'm going to go to the Action tab of this little panel here. And what is the action I want to apply to this parameter? I want to stretch it. So I'm going to do that. It asked to select the parameter. Then it asks to create the stretch frame, which needs to encompass what is it you want to stretch.

Then it asked to select the objects that you actually want to stretch, which in most cases is kind of the same thing but I'm just going to create another window here to select the objects that are going to be stretched. And you want to make sure and include this parameter.

Hit Enter. And I'm done. I now have a dynamic block that can do some pretty cool things. I'm going to close the block editor, save the changes to this block that I just created. And now let's see how this works.

I'm just going to run my Insert command. And I've got the slope ID right here. After it thinks about it a bit, it's going to bring up the little picture but that's OK. We're not going to wait for that. I now have a block that is intelligent. It's got some intelligence to it. Watch what happens when I get close to this line. It just automatically pops to be perpendicular to the line that you pick.

That's pretty amazing to me. That's a dynamic block. And I pick this. And now I've got a little grip here that I can now drag and snap to the toe of the slope. Pretty powerful. You can even take this, and select it, and move it to another location, and it'll automatically grip to the top of slope of that line so it stays perpendicular. Really powerful stuff. That's just a quick example of creating a dynamic block.

Next we're going to jump into tool palettes. So I'm going to close this, get this out of the way, zoom over here a little bit, and bring up tool palettes again. We talked about this briefly but a lot of things you can do here. You can add all kinds of tools in here that will help you and help other users have access to all the tools that you need in your organization to make life easier and to get access to these blocks, and tools, and apps, and settings. Anything you want, you can create a command to do and put it to a tool palette.

So how do you do that? How do you create your own tool palette? Let's do that really quick. I'm going to right click over here and go to All Palettes. Palettes can be broken into groups. And that's what's been done here. I've got a group called Ayres.

But for creating my own palette, I'm going to go to All Palettes. And this just loads all the palettes. And this is probably what you'll see when you first launch or install Civil 3D. You'll see all these palettes. And there's a big list here. You can see a list. It goes forever of all the different types of palettes.

I want to create a new palette, a blank one, for me. I'm going to right click over here. And I'm going to say New Palette. And you'll see that it comes up with a new blank palette. And you have the option to give it a name. I'm just going to call this My Tools. So I've now got a blank tool palette called My Tools.

There's nothing in it right now. So I want to start adding content to this palette. There's lots of different ways to add content to this palette. The quick way is to do things like grabbing a block and pushing and selecting your right button mouse and dragging this into the palette. Brings it in, makes a little picture.

And it's basically a tool for inserting that tool or that block. You can do that with all of these if I wanted to. I'm not going to to save time. But the key here that's important when you're doing it this way, throwing blocks in from a drawing into the tool palette, is that those tools, if you go to Properties-- right click on that tool and go to Properties, you'll see that there's a source file.

So these blocks, when you do it that way, it's linked to a source file. That's where it gets it. It's kind of like a library. So the key there is that once you do this, you can't rename this file, move it to another location, or delete it, or you go to insert this tool from the tool palette and it'll say, hey, I can't find the source drawing where this block comes from.

So if you do it that way, you just got to keep this in a location where your tool palettes are so everybody has access to it so that they can use them. And you can see inside of here, there's all kinds of things you can do with this tool. You can change the scale. You can put it on a certain layer and so on. So that's pretty powerful.

Another thing is like hatch patterns, you can do the same thing. Drag and drop these into your tool palette. This is really useful for standards, for company standards for different types of hatch patterns. These are not linked to a source file.

So once they're in the tool palette, they're there. And you can go in and do all kinds of things with that hatch pattern, including putting it on its own layer and changing some of the parameters such as the scale of the hatch pattern and so on. So that's pretty powerful. You can create different tools in your tool palette of different hatch patterns.

And by the way, you can rename these once you get them in your tool palette. You can right click and rename these to say whatever you want. So the question is, well, so how do I-- I want to create a tool that's just mine, that's my tool, that does something that I want it to do, these insert blocks and insert hatch patterns.

What if I want a tool that loads a list routine or does some sort of macro or settings or something like that? So we're going to do that really quick. And the way to do that-- there's probably other ways to do it. This is the way I like to do it. I'll just draw a line, or a circle, or an arc, any kind of AutoCAD tool or object here. And I drag and drop that into my tool palette.

Now one side note to this is by doing that, you've actually created a tool for drawing a line. And if I go into Properties, it's not just a line but it's you can have that line be on a certain layer. You can have it be a certain scale. A line doesn't really matter for scale but other things you can do here so that that tool, when you do that, it puts it on that layer and so on.

But I'm not going to do that for this. I want to create my own little tool. And I just used this to get a spot on the tool palette. Now I'm going to modify this tool. I'm going to give it a name. I'm going to call this Slope Indicator.

Whoop. I think it's O-R. Slope Indicator. Gave it a name. I'm not going to use the flyouts because I'm customizing this tool. It's not going to be line anymore. It's going to be a slope indicator. So I'm going to say no here. As soon as I say no with this flyout, you can see it activates the command string. This is where the power is at.

You can now do anything you want with this command string. Like I said, you can load settings. You can add a macro here. You can load a list routine using the syntax for loading a list routine and so on. But for me, I'm going to, for this particular macro or tool, I'm going to insert that slope indicator I just created.

So I'm going to type, for my macro, I'm going to start the Insert command, hit Enter. Enter is a semicolon or a space. And I'm going to type in the name of the block that I want to insert, which is SlopeID. It's the one I just created. I'm going to hit Enter again.

And part of the syntax for this command string is I can use a backslash. And this means pause for user input. So it allows me to pause for the insertion point of that block. Then I'm going to hit three enters to get out of the command because I don't need rotation, scale, or any of that because it's all going to be kind of automatic.

But I could do all kinds of stuff down here. I'm not going to do that in interest of time. But I could make it go on a layer or I could just set this to Use Current and do that with all of these. And that's usually what I do. I don't like necessarily my tool to totally have that much control.

Anyway, so I've got that. I've created that. I've now got a tool in here called slope indicator. I pick that guy. And I insert that slope block that I just created. Now you might ask yourself, OK, that's kind of cool but why has my picture got a little line here?

I want it to be this so that I know what I'm doing. I don't want the little image to be a line. We used the Line command to start this tool but I want to change that image. And you can do that real easy. Right click on here and go Specify Image.

And this is where you can-- I'm not going to show you how to do this because of time but you could use Paint to go out and create a 16-bit by 16-bit image-- that's what it uses-- and create a little picture of this so that it shows up here. And then you can browse to that image that you create. You can save those at specified locations and bring in that image. And that will make the little picture here.

So I'm going to go to the-- so we've created this. OK. Back up a little bit. I've created this tool palette. Now what if I want to export that? I want others to have this available or I want to make this be a corporate tool palette so that others have this and it's based on our standards. What do I do there?

So I'm going to right click on here. I'm going to go to Customize Palettes. And it brings up all the different palettes that have been created here. It brings the list of palettes that are installed in Civil 3D. And I'm going to look around here see if I can hopefully find this without looking too long. My Tools. There it is, My Tools right there.

So that's the tool I just created. I'm going to right click on that. And I am going to do Export. That's how you do it. You put it in a location somewhere on your server or somewhere on your own computer if it's for you, if it's just your tool palette. That way you've got that tool palette exported. You can import it later, import it on other people's computers, and make it accessible for everyone to have the same tools. And that's what we've done for our Ayres tool palettes.

These are out on the server or in a location. They're replicated out there so that everybody has access to these. And if I made a change, added a tool here, it'll show up on everybody's computer, everybody's AutoCAD Civil 3D, so they all have the same tools.

If you want to learn how to make this accessible and replicate it for everybody in a corporate setting or an office setting for everybody to have the same tools, just email me and I'll tell you how to do that. I just don't have time to do it in this presentation. So that's tool palettes.

All right. Let's move on. I'm going to get rid of that. Get it out of the way. And we're going to talk about CUI. CUI is a big deal. It's where a lot of stuff is stored. You can get to your CUI by typing the CUI at the command line or you can go to the Manage tab of the ribbon and type in or pick this button, User Interface. And it brings up the CUI.

Let's talk about this for a second. There's a lot that's controlled in here. Your workspaces are stored in here. Your Quick Access toolbars are stored and managed in here. Ribbons, toolbars, keyboard shortcuts. This is not command aliases like short quick keys where you type L and it draws a line.

This is keyboard shortcuts where you type Control something, Control-Alt something and it activates a certain command. We're going to talk about this later, but this is all stored inside of your CUI. There's a main CUI, which is up here, the Civil. I'm in Civil so the main UI is Civil. And then there's partial CUIs that get loaded.

These all get loaded when AutoCAD is installed or Civil 3D is installed. It loads quite a few different partial CUIs. And they're partial because they contain commands and other things that are specific for those CUIs. But the main CUI is Civil.

And inside of the main CUI, you have this panel down here, which you have access to all the commands that are available inside of Civil 3D in AutoCAD. And you can take these commands and do things with them, add them to your tool bar, tool palette, quick access toolbar, and so on. It's all stored inside of the CUI.

OK. Let's first take a look at the Quick Access toolbar. OK. Like I said, it's inside of the CUI. But I'm going to get out of this. I'll just hit Cancel here. And the Quick Access Toolbar is this guy right up here at the top. And it's just what it says. It gives you quick access to tools that you use a lot.

And if you pick this little arrow down here, Autodesk has provided some of the most popular ones that you can add to your Quick Access toolbar. One of the ones I always turn on is Match Properties. Once I slip that or check that, it turns on my Match Properties tool in my Quick Access toolbar. You can turn some of these off. If you don't use them, you can turn them off.

You can also go down here to More Commands. And what that does is it brings up kind of an abbreviated version of the CUI, the customized user interface. It's like the command, only the commands themselves. And you can take and drop, drag and drop. And I'll just pick one. I don't know.

Let's type in text here, something like that. And let's just drag this textile, not that I would do this in a quick access toolbar but if it's something you use all the time, or maybe Edit Text might be a better one. I'll pick that and drag and drop it up to your Quick Access toolbar. And now it's part of that.

But let's get out of this. No. I don't want to do that. I'm going to hit because I don't want to lose what I just did. I added that toolbar or that tool. And I'm going to go into my CUI again, because this is a little bit better place to control your Quick Access toolbar. Just gives you some more flexibility and a little more control.

For example, you can take and move these around in a certain order and so on. But it gives you access to the same commands down here. So I'm going to add a couple more. I'm going to go to Layer because I use Layer On and Layer Off constantly.

So I'm going to go to Layer. Here's Layer Off. Or not Layer On. Layer Off and Layer Freeze is what I use so I'm going to drag and drop these guys into my Quick Access toolbar inside my CUI here. And I'm going to drag my Layer Off up there also. Drag and drop it up here. So now those commands, I have access to them inside my Quick Access toolbar.

Now the other thing I want to do-- this is kind of a little trick that I want to do-- is I want to add the little layer dropdown tool that you pick it, and it drops down, and shows you all the layers that are in this drawing, and you can turn them on and off. You've seen that.

It shows you what the current layer is and so on. That's a different command. It's not listed in here because it's a combo. It has a lot more. It does a lot more than just simply a command. It's a combo. So it's not listed here. So how do I get access to that? Well, I know where it is. It's in the ribbon.

Go down here a little ways. It's under the Home layers tab. Didn't expect you to know this but I'm just showing you what's possible here. The Home Layers panel of the main ribbon here. And you drill down here a little ways.

And there it is, Layer Combo Control. I'm going to right click on that and do Copy. And I'm going to go back up to my Quick Access toolbar. And I'm going to go Paste. Now let's see what happens when I hit OK here.

Now I have access to the Layer Freeze, Layer Off, and this nice little layer dropdown tool that just makes it easy. I want this here because I use this all the time. I don't want to have to go to the Home tab to get access to it because I might be doing other things. And I just don't want to always go back to here. So I add it to my Quick Access toolbar. So that's really cool. That's how you can do things with your Quick Access toolbar.

Now let's go ahead and talk about the CUI and go into it a little more deeper. I want to create a ribbon. And as you can see, we've created a ribbon for our company. It's got all kinds of custom tools in here. It's designed to do exactly what we want. We have our own ribbon called FC Tools.

How do you do that? How do you create your own ribbon? Let's go back. It's really simple. Go back to Manage tab. Go back into the CUI. And this is where you create it. You need to load a partial customization file.

Now before I can do that, I'm going to get out here and I'm going to go to-- already got these kind of located. And this is just Project Explorer or, I mean not Project Explorer, Windows Explorer. And I drilled down deep into AutoCAD. You've been here before, probably a lot of you, where you go to your username, appdata, roaming, Autodesk, Civil 3D 2022, [INAUDIBLE] Support. This is in the handout so don't worry about writing all this down but this is where you get what's called the custom CUIX.

This is a blank CUI. Just a nice starting point. You could open up one of the other CUIs, make a copy of it. And then you've got a whole bunch of deleting to do. You don't want to do that. Let's start with a blank one. So I'm going to drag and drop this custom CUI into a predetermined location.