One of the things you might want to migrate to a new computer, new version, etc. is the items in your Places Bar, the sidebar on the left of File Dialogs in AutoCAD.
These locations are stored in the AutoCAD profile, but we can narrow that down a bit more in case you only want to retrieve these shortcuts without grabbing the entire profile.
Do not proceed with this unless you are familiar with the Windows Registry, REG files, etc. Proceed at your own risk.
- Start Button > Type in Regedit > find regedit.exe in the results and run it.
- Browse down, expand the registry to:
- HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Autodesk\AutoCAD\Rxx.x\ACAD-xxxx:xxx\Profiles\your_profile\Dialogs\AllAnavDialogs (the portions in blue with vary depending on your version of AutoCAD or vertical, your profile name, etc.)
- Right-Click on the AllAnavDialogs key in the left pane and choose Export.
- Give it a file name and save the file. It will have a .REG file extension.
- After your new AutoCAD is installed and you have run it once to get the profiles set up… you will be ready to import these places. IMPORTANT: If your new AutoCAD install is an older or newer verison, you’ll have to edit the registry path in the REG file to match the new (and different) path.
- The REG file is plain ASCII text, so you can open it with Notepad. The first two lines of your REG file should look something like this. Make sure the items shown with an “xxx” match what is in the registry of the target machine.
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00 [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Autodesk\AutoCAD\Rxx.x\ACAD-xxxx:xxx\Profiles\your_profile\Dialogs\AllAnavDialogs]
- Once you are sure the registry path at the top of the file matches the path, save the REG file.
- Double click the file to start the import process. You will probably get a couple of confirmation dialogs, accept those and then fire up AutoCAD and check it out.
Related: AutoCAD Places List hard to read?
