Export custom tool palettes

[jpcadconsulting347236]

Hello,

My client has a bunch of existing tool palettes that they created in ACA 2011. I'm now charged with deploying and configuring 2014.

There does not seem to be a way to export the tool palettes from 2011. Am I missing something? Has all the time they spent creating these palettes simply been wasted?

Any help is appreciated.

[dkoch]

AutoCAD Architecture does not have the export function for tool palettes that vanilla AutoCAD does. Instead, it uses Content Browser and the tool catalogs you define therein to share tools and/or palettes created in a local workspace.

I am in the process of wrapping up a migration from ACA 2010 to ACA 2014. All of our office-standard tool palettes are saved to network-based tool catalogs. End users access those they need by having the network path to a given tool catalog folder as one of the paths under Tool Palettes File Locations (Options dialog, Files tab). I was able to copy each of the 2010 tool catalogs and the associated subfolders to new locations (just to be safe) and then open those catalogs in the 2014 version of Content Browser. I then i-dropped the palettes from the copied tool catalogs into my local workspace (after unchecking the "Link items when added to workspace" toggle in the catalog's properties), giving me a "clean" copy to evaluate and edit and eventually copy to a newly created catalog for 2014.

Because I was also copying all of the source files referenced by the tool palette tools to a new location (to avoid any issues with incompatible file formats while the transition is being made), I used an XML editor (I like Microsoft's XML Notepad 2007 - its free) to quickly replace the old source file paths with the new paths in the palettes in my local workspace, then tested them before copying them to the 2014 catalog.

So, if your client only has tool palettes in the local machine's workspace, the first step would be to use Content Browser (in the 2011 release) to create a tool catalog and then copy the palettes to that catalog. Then you can use that catalog (or a copy thereof) to open the catalogs in Content Browser in the 2014 release.