Tuesday, December 29, 2009

Missing menu files for AutoCAD Architecture and MEP?

For those that still use AutoCAD Architecture (ACA) or AutoCAD MEP (AMEP) - you will find this of great interest. I suppose its about time I tracked this issue down. Back when I installed ACA earlier this year, I noticed there were no pulldown menu's. It didn't bother me much as I was so focused on assimilating the new ribbon. One of our customers finally came across the same issue which forced me to track it down.

After trying a reinstall of the product, looking in the Doc&Settings UserDataCache folder, and reloading CUI files to rebuild them, verifying I had the latest product version, nothing worked. I went on a week and a half long quest with Autodesk support. They told me to try all the things I had already done and then some, but none of their suggestions addressed the fact that the menus were completely missing from the CUI file. In the process of this quest, I also noticed there were no toolbars in the default ACA CUI file.

I asked Autodesk to send me their default ACA CUI file so I could try and load the menus from theirs. It too was blank as was another CUI file I got from a colleague 10 states away that worked at a different company altogether. When I posted this info back to Autodesk support I was getting rather unsettled to put it mildly.

Today they finally sent me a zip file containing all menus and toolbars that I was looking for along with instructions on how to integrate them with ACA. This left me with several questions unanswered that I'm sure you are thinking as well. Why were these not included by default with ACA 2010? Why did they not release a product update to fix this? Why did they assume we would not want these toolbars and menus in 2010? Why did it take a week and a half for them to figure out they needed to send me these files? Oh well - at least I have them now. If you are running ACA or AMEP 2010 you will likely need these files at some point. Rather than re-host them somewhere else, I found they are already posted to AUGI.

Download from this AUGI post

3 comments:

Unknown said...

You are not the first person to run into this Steve, I've noticed it on a client machine as well as a recent re-install on my own PC.

Thanks for the update!

Steve Bennett said...

Heh. The way Autodesk support handled it, I could have sworn I was the first person to have come across this...

Glad you found the update!

David Koch said...

The omission of the pulldown menus and toolbars was "by design", to force you to make friends with the ribbon. The support files were briefly available from the Autodesk website (http://usa.autodesk.com/getdoc/id=TS1103347 --> now a dead link), but were later withdrawn.

As to why Autodesk Support was unaware that the ACA.cuix file was intentionally stripped of pulldowns and toolbars, your guess is as good as (and likely better than) mine.