By Justin Doughty
AutoCAD has a lot of palettes and dialog boxes, and some of the simplest tasks can become frustrating when these go missing. Here’s a guide on the most common, and how to get them back.
Palettes
The Palettes can be turned on from the View tab>Palettes, or using the shortcuts below:
These are:
Ctrl+1 Property Palette
Ctrl+2 Design Center Palette
Ctrl+3 Tool Palette
Ctrl+4 Sheet Set Palette
Ctrl+6 DBConnect Manager
Ctrl+7 Markup Set Manager Palette
Ctrl+8 Quick Calc
Ctrl+9 Command Line
LA Layer Properties Manager
XR External References Palette
You can also manually reset the position of any Palette from the CUI command. Click on the workspace in the top left, then move over to the top right panel.
Expand the Palettes category, and click on the missing palette. Then try toggling its properties in the bottom right panel, such as Orientation, then Apply.
This should force the palette to appear.
Dialog Boxes
If you are using commands that usually have dialog boxes and they are missing, they could be there, but just outside of what is visible on screen. This is sometimes quite common for people using multiple monitors. To fix this, start the command, then:
Hold ‘ALT’ and press ‘SPACE’
Then release
Now press ‘M’
Now either hold left click on the mouse and move around OR use the arrow keys, until the dialogue box comes back into view.
This is shown in the video below:
If you notice that a dialog box is missing for certain commands, and instead the command appears on the command line like the below:
Make sure the following system variable commands are set as default:
FILEDIA is set to 1
CMDIA is set to 1