Working with the AutoCAD ribbon and panels - AutoCAD Tutorial

We're staying in the interface.dwg file and we're going to take a look at another part of the AutoCAD interface now. It's probably the most fundamental part of the AutoCAD interface as well. It's the ribbon at the top of the screen. Now the AutoCAD ribbon contains all the commands that you need to run AutoCAD on a daily basis and the ribbon itself is right up at the top of the screen just underneath the application menu and the quick access toolbar. So it's this kind of grayish area here with all these icons on it now the ribbon itself is broken down into tabs so you've got the home tab the insert tab annotate parametric and so on now this may vary depending on which version of AutoCAD you're using I'm using full AutoCAD 2025 AutoCAD Lt. actually is like a smaller version of full AutoCAD and it's 2d primarily only so it's 2d drafting you can do 3d drafting in full AutoCAD as well there's a lot of other bits of functionality that come in full AutoCAD and aren't available obviously in Lt. as well and it's like a sort of what I call a smaller version of obviously there's a cost implication full AutoCAD is more expensive than AutoCAD Lt. however the ribbon will be different between full AutoCAD and AutoCAD Lt. there'll be a different number of tabs at the top of the screen there. Now basically the ribbon itself like I said controls AutoCAD so this is where you drive AutoCAD it's like your dashboard or in essence if you're driving a car it's like where you're looking at the steering wheel and looking at the controls of the car. Now we've got a drawing open already and I'm not going to jump into any commands what I'm going to do here is jump into the workflow of how the ribbon works itself now it's very easy basically you jump into the tab that you want so there's the home tab I could go to the insert tab I can go to the annotate tab we're going to use the home tab in this instance and what I'm going to do is just show you how these panels on the ribbon actually work so you go to the tab first then you've got the panels now the panels are divided so we've got the draw panel we've got the modify panel we've got the annotation panel and so on now if I wanted to do some drawing in this drawing what I would do is work with the icons here in the draw panel but I can expand the draw panel you'll notice and I can pin it open because there are more command icons there on that fly out so you can see there once I've used those I can then unpin it and it goes back into the ribbon itself again like so now that fly out arrow is available on some of the commands as well so there's circle if I click on that fly out arrow there's all different types of circles if I go to arc different types of arcs if I go up here you've got rectangle and polygon and so on you've also got different types of ellipses and here you've got different types of hatches for example so they're all different draw tools that you can utilize and that's really handy because what that allows you to do is it allows you to work with all the draw tools at any given time you can also drag the draw panel click and hold on the title bar and drag and you can make it into what I jokingly call a sticky panel like a sticky note like a post-it note and that now sits in your drawing area or if you're using a dual monitor setup you could put it on a different monitor as well for example now obviously I can still work with all the draw tools like so but I can also jump to say the annotate tab and instead of having to go back to the home tab to use draw tools here I can use the annotate tab and the draw tools at the same time so I'm just customizing the interface a little bit there now if I want to get this draw panel back into the ribbon there's a little t-shaped icon just there can you see it return panels to ribbon so I hover over the draw panel these sidebars appear click on the little sort of t-shaped icon there go back to the home tab now and my draw panel is back so that's how quick and easy is to work with all of these different panels and icons on your tabs on the ribbon now there's one more little tip I want to show you here that quite often freaks people out when they're first using AutoCAD there's a little white button just here can you see that one minimize to panel buttons if you click on it each time you click on it the appearance of the ribbon will change it's that little white button with the up arrow click there click again click one more time and you're back to the original ribbon configuration so if you ever click on that little white button there with the arrow on it don't panic just keep clicking and you'll get back to your default ribbon configuration again but that's pretty much the ribbon as it is in AutoCAD and AutoCAD Lt. that's where you drive your AutoCAD from all those commands on the AutoCAD ribbon