Customizing the user interface

- If you spend a lot of time working in Revit, then you will no doubt discover that screen real estate often becomes a premium. So there's a few different ways that you can manage your interface to adjust it to your liking. And one of the things that we can do is adjust the way the pallets are organized on the screen. So this would include the Properties Pallet and the Project Browser that we talked about in the last two movies, but it would also include other pallets that you can display as well. So if we look over here at the left-hand side of the screen, I have my Properties Pallet above my Project Browser in the default configuration.

This is how it would install out of the box. But with either of these, you can actually come over here to the title bar, click and hold down your mouse, and tear it away from the docked location on the screen. Now you'll see this big gray border, and when I let go, you'll see that now the Project Browser is a floating pallet, and you can see that I can easily move that around on screen. Now the only disadvantage of that is it actually covers up the drawing window underneath, so the best use of carrying it off in this fashion would be if you actually have two monitors connected to your screen.

So now days, a lot of folks have double monitors, and so if you do have that, you can actually tear off both of these pallets and put them on the second screen and then your view window can be a nice full screen view. So that's definitely something that you can do. Now of course, you'll also notice that the Properties pallet is still docked on the left and so it now fills up the entire vertical part of the space. Now you can dock these pallets to any of the four sides of the screen. And so if I grab this floating pallet, and I start to move it to the edge here, notice that it wants to dock to the upper portion of the screen.

Or if I drag it to this edge down here, it will want to dock to the lower portion of the screen. Now I wouldn't necessarily recommend that with the Project Browser because as you can see, it significantly reduced the size of the view window, and unless you have really long view names, all of this space over here to the right is just empty white space. So I would think that the best place for your Project Browser and your Properties Pallet would be on the vertical sides of the screen or on the seperate monitor.

Now some folks prefer to organize their Revit screen this way, where they have a Properties Pallet on one side and a Project Browser on the other, and they benefit from both of them being the full height of the screen. So that's another configuration that's very popular. Here's another option. I'm gonna pull this back off again. And this one is a little bit trickier to get used to, so you're gonna want to play very close attention to the onscreen cues when you do this next thing. So I've got my browser floating, and I'm gonna start to drag it. Notice that I get this big gray box that sort of simulates the shape of the pallet.

If I move it over here towards where the Properties is, pay attention to the shape of the gray box and notice that it's now a much longer and thinner rectangle. If I were to let go, it will actually dock on there as a very narrow window, and it puts itself next to the Properties Pallet. Now you can always put your mouse here and adjust the width of it. So again, if you want, you can put them side by side like that. Let's peel it off again and look at another alternative.

If I take this, and I start to drag it, the first thing we start to see is what I just showed you, that it's gonna try and dock on like this. Here's the trick. Don't pay attention to the gray box so much. The gray box is the feedback for the end result that you're gonna get. You wanna pay attention to where your mouse pointer is. If I look where my mouse pointer is, notice that as I move it up just underneath the title bar of Properties, it's actually gonna dock it on top of the Properties pallet.

Let me tear it off again. Let me shrink this down a little bit narrower here. Now suppose I take this and drag it down here. Okay? Now it would give me below the Properties pallet. And then finally, if I put it right on top of the tool bar of the Properties pallet. You can see where my mouse is. It's on that blue bar. You can kinda see at the very bottom, a little gray line that kind of has a step in it.

And what that's gonna do is it's actually gonna put the two pallets on top of each other and tab them. So when I let go, notice that I get a tab here for Properties and another tab here for Project Browser, and if I click, it switches between the two. So if I don't have two monitors, but you don't like having the pallets stacked on top of each other and really short, you can make them full screen height like this and tab them. The only downside is that you have to remember to click the tab to switch between the two. So it really is just a matter of preference which one of these you choose.

But there's a lot of different options that are available to you. I'm gonna tear this off one more time, and I just want to reiterate it's the mouse pointer that you want to follow. So again if I do this right below the title bar, it stacks. Right on the title bar, it gives me a tab. So that's how you know which one you're gonna get. I'm actually gonna put it back down here, right underneath my Properties pallet where it started off. And for the remainder of the course, I'm gonna leave it in its default position, but you are welcome to use any of those methods that I just showed you and move the two pallets to any configuration that suits your own personal preference.