From the course: AutoCAD 2026 Essential Training

Utilizing the Quick Access Toolbar (QAT) in AutoCAD - AutoCAD Tutorial

From the course: AutoCAD 2026 Essential Training

Start my 1-month free trial Buy for my team

Utilizing the Quick Access Toolbar (QAT) in AutoCAD

“

- [Instructor] Once again, we're staying in our interface.dwg file. You'll notice for a lot of these videos, we're not really doing much in AutoCAD. What I'm doing is I'm taking you into the interface a bit more deeply so you understand where things are, so that when we start working on the exercises further along in the course, you know where to locate specific functions within AutoCAD. In this particular video, we're going to take a deeper dive into the quick access toolbar. Now that's top left up near the application menu, so it's these icons up here. So you can see we've got new, we've got open, we've got save. We've also got save as where we can save a copy of the current drawing under a new file name. We can open up files from the AutoCAD web and mobile folders, and we can also save files to the web and mobile folders. That's a cloud based area based on your Autodesk account where you can save DWG files. So the AutoCAD web and mobile folders are exactly what it says on the tin. They are web and mobile folders based in the cloud where you can utilize the AutoCAD web application and the AutoCAD mobile application. You'll notice there we've got an icon there that allows us to plot straight away based on our plot settings, and we've also got undo. You'll notice there you can see I can undo commands and go back to a group of commands. And it's the same with the redo, but I haven't done anything yet with the redo, so there's nothing to redo right now. Now you'll notice we've also got share. We can share our drawing from the Quick Access toolbar as well. But it's this little icon here that's really clever. So if I click on that, it looks a bit like an eject symbol from an old CD player. If I click on it, I can customize the quick access toolbar. So what I can do here is I can add other commands that I use all the time to the Quick Access toolbar, hence the name Quick Access. So if I go down here and I perhaps add something like say the layer command, what that does now is it adds the layer drop down here so I can see all the layers in my AutoCAD drawing and change the setting of those layers. Now, we can also do that over here in the layers panel, in the home tab on the ribbon. You'll notice that dropdown is the same right there. But it saves me having to worry about that. I might go into the insert tab. I don't have access to that layer dropdown on the layers panel now, but I have it on the quick access toolbar instead like so. So I'll just hit escape there a couple of times now, just to finish off that particular dropdown. If you hit escape a couple of times, the dropdown will disappear. I'll go back to the home tab on the ribbon. Now, one of the things you might want to do is leave that layer setting switched on. There's the little eject type symbol again. Layer is now ticked, you'll notice. So if I click on it again, it unticks it, and you'll notice the layers disappear. Click on the little symbol again, click on layer. We've got layers back on the quick access toolbar. It's that quick and it's that easy. Now, there are some other settings there as well. If I click there like so, I can potentially show it below the ribbon instead of above the ribbon. So if I click there, notice the quick access toolbar's now here below the ribbon. Click on that again, show it above the ribbon. I can go like so. Now there are some other settings that I can use there. I can show the old fashioned menu bar. Show menu bar. Can you see there? We've got all the old dropdowns at the top now. Can you see that there? So if I click on something like file, I've got all the old dropdowns that we had in older versions of AutoCAD. If I click on the arrow here, I can hide the menu bar, and you can see it disappears again. So there's lots of different ways of getting quick access to your AutoCAD commands using the quick access toolbar. One of the little challenges there for you is to go and set that layer setting in the quick access toolbar so that you've got the layer dropdown, and then just leave it there in the quick access toolbar and use that later on as you work through the videos and the exercises in this course.

Contents