Clearing up the AutoCAD MEP Workspace Confusion

I recently returned from Salt Lake City. It was my first visit there and with the price of airline tickets we drove our PT Cruiser there instead. We have a 5-speed and drive conservatively as well as keep 5lbs. of extra air in the tires, use K & N filters for air and oil, and changed over before the trip to synthetic oil. We always get 35-37 mpg. We got 35 mpg religiously. Gas was mostly $4.09 a gallon almost everywhere except when we stopped to visit my mother in Tulsa it was about $3.89 and it was slightly less than that when we returned to Roanoke. We put almost 5,000 miles on the car for the entire trip.

So, enough of my personal baloney. What about these workspaces?

Tool palettes are one of those can't live without features whether you're using vanilla AutoCAD, AutoCAD Architecture, or AutoCAD MEP. They came out in 2004 and keep improving.

AutoCAD MEP has discipline specific tool palettes for HVAC, Piping, Electrical, Plumbing, Schematic, and access to some basic architectural tools with an Architectural tool palette. There are also related pulldown menus. The pulldown menus are how you get to specific preferences and system definitions.

When you start AutoCAD MEP for the first time your default workspace is HVAC. That will give you the HVAC tool palette and the HVAC pulldown menu.

Most users don't realize what the workspace is or what it does. What happens most of the time is that a user decides to see what is on another tool palette such as piping.



The user right clicks on the Tool Palette and selects the other Tool Palette. Note: If your tool palette is docked (allow docking checked above), it may not have the menu bar on the side as shown above. Depending on the version it will have this menu bar along the top for you to right click or for versions prior to 2009 will have stripped area at the top.

The workspace has settings to save changes. When this is set, any changes you make to your toolbars will stay with the workspace. Normally this is helpful so that when you close the program and reopen it your workspace will be the way you like it. It's no different than having your stapler on the right side of your monitor and your tape dispenser on the left. There's nothing worse than someone borrowing your stapler from your desk and returning it to the wrong place or not returning it at all! But I digress.



If you've changed to your piping palette and your workspace is set to automatically save, then you will have your piping palette saved with your HVAC workspace. In this situation, you would just need to change back to your HVAC palette and be sure that your workspace settings are set to automatically save changes.

You can get to your workspace settings by selecting the tool above that looks like a little gear or by selecting from the drop down list.


All this is done in the background within the CUI.


If you want to have some HVAC and some Piping palettes under one palette or under a workspace called your name, you can do so in the cui or by choosing Customize Palettes when you right click on the tool palette menu bar.

You can drag individual palette names from the left hand side to the appropriate tool palette group on the right hand side. You can also right click on either side to add new groups or new palettes.

I hope this helps to clear up some of the confusion. Let the workspace work for you instead of working against it.