Working with the Ribbon

 The ribbon is located at the top of your screen, and it is the launching pad for most of your Civil

3D commands. The commands that it contains are organized into groups through the use of tabs

and panels. The ribbon itself is divided into a series of tabs that include Home, Insert, Annotate,

and so on, as illustrated in Figure 1.3.

Each tab is divided into panels. For instance, the Home tab shown in Figure 1.4 includes the

Palettes, Create Ground Data, Create Design, Profile & Section Views, and Draw panels.

Because Civil 3D groups the commands in this way, you never have to choose from

more than a handful of commands once you’ve taken your best guess at the correct

tab and panel. Also, you’ll find that the more you use Civil 3D, the better you will get at

knowing the location of the commands. It’s not so much memorizing their positions as

it is learning how Civil 3D “thinks”—that is, the way in which it relates commands to

one another and categorizes them into tabs and panels.