About Creating Tool Palettes

Use tool palettes to organize blocks, hatches, and custom tools in a tabbed window. You can build tool palettes using several methods.

Here's an example of dragging or clicking and placing a callout bubble from the Annotation tab.

Methods for Creating Tool Palettes

You can easily create a new tool palette:

  • Use the tool palette shortcut menu to create a new, empty palette.
  • Use a DesignCenter shortcut menu to create a tool palette tab with selected content.

Tool Palette Content

Tool palettes can contain a variety of types of tools. These tools are ideal for adding objects such as the following:

Other types of supported content include geometric objects, dimensions, xrefs, and raster images. You can also add lights, cameras, visual styles, and materials (not available in AutoCAD LT).

Methods for Adding Tools to Tool Palettes

You can add tools to a new or existing tool palette using several methods.

Customize Tool Palettes

Once you've created a palette, you can modify it to suit your needs. Several options are available from shortcut menus:

Palette Groups

To organize and reduce the number of tool palettes in the tool palettes window, you can define and display tool palette groups. A tool palette group limits the number of palettes displayed in the Tool Palettes window. The Customize Palettes option provides options to create and organize tool palette groups.

For example, you can drag a palette from the list in the left pane under a group in the right pane.

The topics below provide greater detail for specific capabilities to customize, import, export, and share tool palettes and tool palette groups.