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Points made by Lynn Allen.

Putting files in the Favorites folder doesn't physically move them; it only places shortcuts into the Autodesk Favorites folder, which is a child to the Windows system Favorites folder. These shortcuts can reference items on your local drive, networked drive or the Internet.

To modify the Favorites folder, you right click on the Palette and select Organize Favorites from the shortcut menu. Right clicking on any file or folder lets you delete, add to zip files, rename and so on. When deleting a file from the Favorites folder, you'll see a warning that lets you know it's going to the Recycle Bin. Don't be alarmed; it's deleting the shortcut -not the actual file.

The Bottom Line

The real deal with DesignCenter is that you can easily drag and drop content, including PS Layouts from one drawing to another ( -AJ alturnatively right-click on the Layout tab, select Template then browse for a .dwt or .dwg). This is done by dragging and dropping the desired layer, block, PS Layout and so forth from the DesignCenter Palette into your drawing. You can also select the desired content, right click and copy it to the clipboard. Follow this up by picking in the destination drawing, right clicking and pasting. This procedure takes more time but could be useful if you needed to drop the content into multiple drawings. Double clicking on block definitions will execute the INSERT command, which permits you to control the scale factor, rotation angle and so on. You will also get this option if you right click and drag the content over to the drawing.

So what scale factor do you get when you drag and drop blocks over to your drawing? If you take a look in the UNITS command in AutoCAD 2000, you'll note a new option added to the dialog box: drawing units for DesignCenter blocks. Here you can specify the units you want AutoCAD to use when inserting blocks via drag-and-drop procedures. You'll also find that if you insert a block containing dimensions, it's doubtful that the dimensions will insert true to scale.

Note: If you plan on accessing drawing content from an Internet location, you must have selected the optional Internet Browser Components during the installation process. You may need to go back into Installation and use the Custom option to add these components.

The named objects that the AutoCad 2000 DesignCenter makes available are:
    Layers
    Linetypes
    Text styles
    Dimension styles
    Block definitions (including xrefs)
    Paper space layouts

Next Release?

In the next release of AutoCAD I'd like the DesignCenter to work with all named objects, not just the few it currently supports. I'd also like more detailed views of layers, linetypes, text styles and so forth available in the Palette. For example, I'd like to be able to view the color and linetype of a layer-not just the layer name. I'd also like to see what the text style looks like and so on.