24 Part I: AutoCAD 101

By default, AutoCAD 2013 opens in the Drafting & Annotation workspace, and will continue to do so until you make another workspace current. (We explain workspaces in the section “And They’re Off: AutoCAD’s Opening Screens,” later in this chapter.) If you’ve been away from AutoCAD for a while, right now you may be asking yourself, “Where are my toolbars? Where is my menu bar? Where is the text-only side screen menu (if you have been away for a long time)?” Unlike older Windows programs, AutoCAD 2013 sports just one toolbar — the Quick Access Toolbar, on the application title bar, right next to the Application button (known informally as the “Big Red A”) — and doesn’t show a menu bar in this environment. Instead, the Drafting & Annotation workspace displays two major interface items:

The Application Menu: Clicking the Application button at the top-left corner of the AutoCAD window opens the AutoCAD 2013 Application Menu, which presents file-related commands only; here you can create new drawings, open existing drawings, save files, or print your masterpieces.

The Ribbon: The Ribbon replaces the menus, toolbars, many of the palettes, and the dashboard of earlier releases. Whereas the Application Menu focuses on file management, the Ribbon is where you find commands to create and modify drawing objects. The Autodesk programmers made a best guess at a task-based approach to drafting and organized the old interface items into panels of related tools.

We discuss both of these items in more detail in the following sections. For the dyed-in-the-wool traditionalists, you can reset the AutoCAD 2013 environment so it looks pretty much like it did in AutoCAD 2008. We show you how in the “Going for that classic look” sidebar, later in this chapter.

AutoCAD Does Windows (And Office)

Whether you’re a total newcomer or an experienced user from a few releases back, we can guarantee that finding your way around AutoCAD 2013 is going to be an interesting experience.

If you’re already familiar with the Microsoft Office 2007 suite, you may recognize some program features, such as the Ribbon and the Application Menu, which you use for choosing commands or changing system settings. But even if AutoCAD’s new look does seem a little familiar in places, many aspects of the program’s appearance — and some of the ways in which you work with it — are quite different from other Windows programs. Depending on the workspace you’ve chosen to use, you can, in many cases, tell the program what to do in at least five ways — pick a toolbar button, pick from a pull-down menu, pick a tool button from a Ribbon panel, type at the keyboard, or choose from a right-click menu — none of which is necessarily the best method to use for every task.

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