The Libraries tab displays previews or a list of block definitions from a single, specified drawing or a folder. These blocks can come from the current and other recent drawings. The Recent tab displays previews or a list of block definitions recently inserted or created in the current and previous sessions. The Current Drawing tab displays previews or a list (user’s preference) of block definitions available in the current drawing.
The Blocks Palette is divided into three tabs. If a picture is worth a thousand words, a gallery must be worth million, right?įinally, we get to 2020 and Autodesk gifts us with the Blocks Palette! The Blocks Palette continues the trend away from dialog boxes and towards palettes that can be anchored to either side of the interface, or stashed on a separate monitor if the user has more than one monitor, and palettes don’t prevent the user from issuing unassociated commands while they’re open (imagine trying to pan or zoom while the Select File dialog box is open). Then Autodesk introduces the Block Gallery, an expandable panel that allows the user to see previews of the blocks currently inserted into their drawing before they insert them. This dialog box wowed me from the first because it allowed me to insert a drawing file, that I or someone else drew earlier, into my current drawing, and even rotate that drawing after I placed it! For a drafter who started their career on a drafting table with T-squares, Triangles, and French Curves, that’s a pretty big deal. My first introduction to the world of AutoCAD Blocks was the Insert Dialog Box. If AutoCAD could talk, it would say, “Blocks are compound objects that are commonly used for symbols, parts, detail views, and title blocks (or borders).” Blocks keep AutoCAD users from having to repeatedly draw objects that appear in their drawings multiple times, thereby saving unimaginable amounts of time and work. Now you might say, “But the Blocks Palette is an AutoCAD 2020 feature,” and you are absolutely right! But the smart folks at Autodesk saw fit to improve upon the Blocks Palette by adding the Blocks Library Tab – something that I think was the natural next step in the decades-long evolution of block insertion. But every now and again I’m asked, “Daron, what is your FAVORITE AutoCAD feature?” And this, my friend, is one of those days!ĪutoCAD 2021 came out in late March of this year (every AutoCAD user’s favorite time of year) and since then, I’ve realized my favorite new feature is the Blocks Palette. But the truth is, quite often I just can’t find anyone to listen to me wax geometric about my love of AutoCAD. Many of the people I work with have also worked with AutoCAD for a long time, so you might think we’d have some deep AutoCAD discussions when we were face-to-face (back in our pre-pandemic days). I’ve been an AutoCAD user for a long time, about 25 years now.
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