Customizing the Navigator Palettes in Autodesk Design Review 2008

Sometimes you don’t need or want to have all of the navigator palettes displayed.  If you only use Design Review for viewing 2D DWF files, having the Cross Sections palette getting in your way can be frustrating. Overcome your palette frustration and rid yourself of unused (or little used) palettes by creating or modifying the Design Review Navigator Pane with custom palette layouts.

When you first start Design Review, all palettes are displayed, equally spaced, in the Navigator pane.

If your workflow doesn’t require one or more palettes, you can collapse them by clicking the arrow next to the palette’s name, or you can minimize them to the Navigator Dock by clicking the hide button in the palette’s titlebar. For users who will only ever view a certain kind of file, this type of solution may be  suitable since Design Review will retain the last used layout the next time the program starts.

However, if you view different kinds of files or perform more than one task in the Design Review process, you may need to have multiple Navigator Pane layouts that can be quickly accessed.

Design Review 2008 has three predefined custom layouts built in. For example, when you click the Cross Section tool, or click the Measure or Markup tools, you’ll notice that the layout of the navigator pane changes based on tool selection.

Unfortunately, some users don’t want the Navigator palettes to do anything when they’re sectioning a model, creating markup, or dimensioning geometry in Design Review.

To keep the Navigator Pane layout from changing when you choose different tools

1. Arrrange the palettes according to your preferences.
2. In the Navigator Pane Toolbar,   click the Options button (at the right edge).
3. Choose Save Current Layout to >
4. Select the layout to save the customized view.

Note: The custom layout cannot be renamed.

Now, whenever you choose a different tool in Design Review, your Navigator Pane layout will be displayed according to your customization.

If you determine that a layout you have saved doesn’t serve your needs, you can repeat the process above, or choose Restore Layout Defaults to reset all layouts.

We have also created an AVI of the process and you can download it here.

--Volker

Comments

[Anne]

Is there a way to have files show in the left pane of the viewer rather than always doing "File, Open"?

The proprietary software (Camel Fastlook) allows files to show in their viewer, but we didn't see how this could be done with the AutoCAD version of a viewer.