The dockable panels around the canvas, and how their layout is remembered.
Everything beside the canvas is a panel, and every panel behaves the same way: it can be docked to an edge, pulled off into a floating window, or collapsed to a tab on the dock strip. All of them are listed under View > Panels, which is where to go when one has gone missing.
A docked panel takes a strip of the window edge and the canvas gives up the room. A floating panel is a window of its own that can go on a second monitor. A collapsed panel is reduced to a labelled tab on the dock strip, still there, taking no space until you click it.
The panel's content is the same object in all three states, not three copies of it, so nothing is lost or reset by moving a panel around mid-task.
The layout is saved with the project, so the arrangement you leave a job in is the one you come back to.
Opening a PDF directly rather than opening a project starts in a clean canvas with every panel collapsed to its tab. Changes made in that mode are deliberately not saved, so a quick look at a drawing cannot overwrite the layout you set up for your project.
Most panels always come back as at least a collapsed tab, even if you closed them, so the dock strip never goes empty and you can always see which panels exist. The exception is a panel that only opens on request, such as Tools: close one of those and it stays gone until you ask for it again.
| Panel | What it is for |
|---|---|
| Properties | Everything about whatever is currently selected. |
| Markup | The review list: every markup in the project, one row each. |
| Tools | The full markup tool set, as a panel rather than a toolbar. |
| Materials | The materials takeoff module. Documented with Materials Takeoff. |
| Utilities | The utilities takeoff module. Documented with Utilities Takeoff. |
Materials and Utilities appear only on plans that include those modules. If one is absent from View > Panels, that is why.