Setting up the Plant 3D workspace

- [Instructor] Plant 3D is designed to make efficient use of the AutoCAD workspace feature. If you're familiar with AutoCAD, you know that you can load different workspaces that contain different ribbon menus, toolbars, and tool palettes based on the type of work you're doing. Let's take a look at some examples. So if you look at the ribbon menu that we have across the top, if you just go through here, you can see we have our project manager, we have our parts insertion, orthos. All of these options pertain to 3D piping. And if you look at the tool palette, I'm going to scroll through the tool palette, and you see here we have a full complement of piping components that are available to us to use inside our piping model.

If you're working on piping as well, you can always come down here and change the workspace, maybe updating a P&ID that's involved in this project. We can come down here and we can see a list of the different workspaces available. So, for example, if you want to work in a P&ID environment, we just click on the PID PIP. And you'll notice that the tool palettes change and it's now showing us all the options and components that we have for making P&IDs. The ribbon menus change too. We now have our P&ID, our schematic lines. So it just makes it a little bit more convenient for you to group the different functions.

We also can go back to standard AutoCAD drafting and annotation. Going to choose this here. And this should be something you're familiar with. This is just the very basic AutoCAD feature commands here. And you'll notice at the top under the quick start, you have the option of adding your workspace changer to the quick start menu, and that's simply by coming up to the down arrow, and you'll see you have the option of choosing here. And instead of just giving you the gear, it actually gives you a tag to show you what's there. If you don't have that shown on your desktop, your quick start menu can be found by looking for this little icon here, and look for the workspace.

If it's not checked off, it'll look like this. If you want to add that in, just pull the little down arrow and check your workspace on. And then you have the gear that allows you to do that change, that quick change. Down at the bottom, you only have the gear. So let me just go back and switch to our 3D piping. And you'll see we have all the information, all the menu choices that we need to continue building our model. So just to recap that, when using the workspaces, it allows you to change the menus, the ribbons, and the toolbars and the tool palettes to show only the information that's relevant to the type of work you're doing.

You can see there's a lot of icons involved in this program, so using workspace really cleans up the interface and keeps the workflow straightforward.