AutoCAD: Creating a Tool Palette with multiple Blocks at Once

You don't need to manually add each Block to a tool palette, it can be done with just a few clicks.
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Not so long ago, I wrote a post explaining how to transfer Tool Palettes from one computer to another. The following post also explained how to create a new group of palettes.
What I found out today is how to create a new Palette from a file. This is very useful if we want to generate a palette with a lot of Blocks that we have stored in a single file. With just a few blocks, or with blocks in different files, we would manually drag and drop the blocks into the new palette. That becomes tedious if we have to do it for a lot of blocks. The solution is quite simple:
We make sure first that we have active the group of palettes where we want to add the new one. We also need to have the drawing containing the Blocks open. From the design center ("Ctrl + 2" or ADCENTER command) we select the file with the blocks we want to add, right click it and select "create palette". See the image for a visual aid to do this.
The result will be a palette with the anme of the file, and ALL the Blocks that the file contained, organized alphabetically.
Thanks to Aarti for this tip.


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AutoCAD: Creating New Palette Group

Organize your blocks on a custom made tool palette.. We might want to create a new Tool Palette Group, let´s say to store all our blocks. The default groups in AutoCAD Architecture 2008 are Design, Document, Detailing and Visualization.

Lets assume that we want to create a new palette group for all the blocks we have.We have to right click on the lower corner of the tool palettes bar and select "Customize Palettes". We will get the following screen.

On the righ portion of the window we right click on a blank portion of the screen and we select "New group". We will name the new group "Blocks". Now to be able to see the new group it needs to have at least one palette. We can drag one palette from one of the default groups to our custom created one.
We click close and right click again the bottom corner of the tool palettes bar. A new line with the name of our group will appear.

Once in the new group we can add as many palettes as we want to it, and drag and drop the blocks to them so they can be easily accessed from any file.
Once we have created our grup and configured our palettes we might want to transfer them to other computers. See this post to know how to do that.

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AutoCAD: Transferring Tool Palettes

Transfer your tool palettes from one computer to another.
Català - Castellano
After creating tool palettes in any of the AutoCAD versions, you might want to transfer them to other computers in your network. There is no Export command so finding the way to do so it might be a bit complicated.
Here is a link to the support site from autodesk about the topic. Basically it explains the following steps to do that. You have to use the content browser. But the explanation from autodesk I think is a bit short and might not be enough fo a newby. So here comes a kind of extended version of it.
To store the palettes you have created do the following:

• Click on the content browser icon or type CONTENTBROWSER in the command line window.
• Right click and "Add Catalog" --> Create New Catalog
• Browse to a network location that all computers can access.
• Save the catalog there.
• Double click the new catalog that you have created.
• Drag and drop the new palettes to from you palettes side bar to the Catalog.
  

In any computer where you want to add those palettes, follow these steps

• CONTENTBROWSER
• Add catalog --> Add an existing Catalog
• Browse t the network location you specified before
• Double click the new added catalog
• Drag and drop the palettes you want from the catalog to your tool palettes bar. (see that it is not a simple drag and drop operation, you have to click in the palette you want to load in the contend browser and keep pressing the mouse button till a syringe icon loads, then drag to the tool palettes bar in AutoCAD

Note: After the initial transfer operation, you can add new tool palettes that you created by drag and dropping them to the Catalog in Content Browser. That will make any palette you created in one computer available to the other users on your network.


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