Flash CS5: The Missing Manual

Panels and Toolbars

If you followed the little exercise on A Tour of the Flash Workspace, you know you can put panels and toolbars almost anywhere onscreen. However, if you use the Essentials workspace, you start off with a few frequently used panels and toolbars docked neatly on the right side of the program window.

It's a little easy to get confused by the Flash nomenclature. Flash has toolbars, panels, palettes, and windows. Sometimes collapsed panels look like toolbars and open up when clicked—like the frequently used Tools panel. Toolbars and panels pack the most commonly used options together in a nice compact space, so you don't have to do a hunt-and-peck through the main menu every time you want to do something. Panels are great, but they take up precious real estate. As you work, you can hide certain tools to get a better view of your artwork. (You can always get them back by choosing their names from the Window menu.)

Toolbars and panels are such an integral part of working with Flash that's it's helpful to learn some of their tricks early on:

• Move a panel. Just click and drag the tab or top of the panel to a new location. Panels can float anywhere on your monitor, or dock on an edge of the Flash program window (as in the Essentials workspace). For more details on docking and floating, see the box on Docked vs. Floating.

• Expand or collapse a panel. Click the double-triangle button at the top of a panel to expand or collapse it. Collapsed panels look like toolbars, showing ...