No Land F/X Toolbar Options

Issue

You're unable to access the Land F/X toolbars.

For example, you may have attempted to access the Land F/X toolbars from the CAD Tools menu, as shown below, but did not see an option for the Land F/X toolbars menu.

Cause

After announcing that we'd be phasing out toolbars since March 2019, and supporting the transition for 5 years afterwards, we no longer support AutoCAD or F/X CAD version 2019, so toolbars are now completely phased out.

Why?

• Autodesk began phasing out toolbars in favor of ribbons in 2009.

Regardless of the initial familiarity with learning AutoCAD with toolbars, it's not practical for software developers to devote time to maintaining these legacy features. It takes time away from working on improving other features. We followed this user interface change shortly after.

• Both Land F/X and Autodesk stopped adding new tools to the toolbars more than a decade ago.

These toolbars are extremely out of date and no longer reflect the usability of the software.

• None of our technical support staff members have toolbars in their installations, nor did any use the toolbars even when they were in the software.

It takes time away from our fantastic technical support to attempt to answer questions about old toolbars and help get toolbars to show. We had to make the decision to end our support for them due to the excessive time taken up by these issues.

• None of our videos or documentation pages show toolbars anymore.

• Ribbons are faster to use than toolbars once embraced and learned properly.

Admittedly, this is the most debated point, but in our collective experience as AutoCAD technical support, we've found it to be true. Plus they're easier for new AutoCAD users to learn when learning the software.

We do have staff members who started learning AutoCAD with toolbars and then subsequently adjusted their workflow to use ribbons later. They've likened the process to learning to type with all 10 fingers instead of 2 fingers. It's slower at first, but once you change your muscle memory, it's much faster to type with 10 fingers.

• Ribbons are an actual improvement over toolbars in terms of features.

• You're able to have small or large icons to save space or make more visible, as needed.

• You're able to have customizable command titles appear next to or underneath the icons, which helps with tool identification in a crunch, or on a bad day. It's also what makes ribbons more new-user-friendly.

• Ribbons have hover tooltips. Hovering on any tool shows a short description, a long description, and sometimes an image to help you understand how a tool is used. These tooltips can help even experienced users learn new features and start including them in their workflow faster. You can also tap F1 and open that specific tool's help page for both AutoCAD and Land F/X tools.

• Ribbons can float and dock just like toolbars, and even look like old toolbars with small icons and no text, and still provide all the benefits listed above.

• Ribbons have built-in display changing options. Clicking the arrow icon to the right of the ribbon tabs quickly cycles between expanded ribbons and different styles of collapsed ribbons, which allows you to save space while on a small laptop screen and expand ribbons on larger monitors.

• When ribbons were added, so was the Quick Access Toolbar (QAT). The QAT is the perfect place for your most used tools to live. It's always there, and only shows small icons with no text – just like a toolbar. Plus, this toolbar can have dynamic dropdowns like the layer control box.

• You should be regularly drafting on a monitor of at least 1920x1080 resolution (but ideally 2560x1440 or larger), all of which provides plenty of space to show ribbons and a lot of your drawing in Model Space. This recommendation eliminates the argument about needing more space (along with the ribbon-collapsing options and QAT). If you are finding that you don't have a lot of space on a monitor, we recommend asking an IT administrator to look at your Windows and display settings to resize objects better on your screen.

• Clicking any visual button is not the fastest way to draft. Whether they're using toolbars or ribbons, the fastest drafters use the Command line, and in particular, curated shortcut aliases. You should be able to draft 99% of the time without ever clicking a tool on any ribbon. If that's not the case, then that's where we recommend focusing your continued training to improve your AutoCAD drafting skills, to make AutoCAD or F/X CAD like an extension of your fingers instead of a tool you're constantly fighting against.

• Brand-new installations of AutoCAD or F/X CAD do not have toolbars showing by default.

Using ribbons means less initial customization time on new installations.

In summary, we couldn't justify spending time maintaining the toolbars, and leaving the old toolbars there without changing them was still a drain on resources. Based on everything outlined above, that's why pre-set toolbars are not coming back. This is not saying that you can't continue using them on your own. You just will need to use your own resources to assemble them.

We do genuinely understand that change can be difficult, which is why we started alerting users to this upcoming change very early and gave a 5-year grace period for users to learn the ribbons while still having the toolbars as a safety net, and also helped users during this time to customize their installations to continue using toolbars for this purpose. We just can't offer this extra personalized support forever.

Solution

We recommend reviewing the following resources to learn how to use and customize the ribbons to what you need going forward:

• The AutoCAD and Land F/X ribbons
• Create a Custom Floating Ribbon Panel for Your Most-Used Tools
• Customize Your Ribbons Webinar
• Create a Custom Floating Ribbon Power Tip
• How to Get the Latest Land F/X Ribbons & Menus