Now you can place and size your Dashboard-like thing as you see fit. In the tab title row (the bar with the word Home in it), right-click and pick Undock. If the Ribbon is not visible (it won’t be if you just selected the AutoCAD Classic workspace), enter Riboon to bring it back. The AutoCAD 2007/8 Dashboard is gone, but you can have a vertical Ribbon instead.
If you ever want to turn it back on, enter Ribbon. You can close the Ribbon with the RibbonClose command. If you’re using a vertical variant of AutoCAD 2011, this workspace may not be available, so you’ll need to make your own by manually setting up your interface the way you like it, then saving it as a Workspace using the Save Current As… option under one of the Workspace controls. This will perform some of the steps described below, but not all of them, so I suggest you read on. In either case, click on the Workspace control and pick the item called AutoCAD Classic. If you want the name, this year you need to look in the QAT. Every odd-numbered release seems to have the current workspace name missing from this button, so this year we miss out. This is a little button that looks like a gearwheel.
If you have turned this off (right-click, Remove from Quick Access Toolbar) or if you just prefer working with interface elements in the same place year by year, there is another Workspace control in the bottom right corner. The main Workspace control is now located near the top right corner.
In vanilla AutoCAD, you can restore much of the user interface by just switching workspaces. Let’s assume you’ve made the decision to put your environment back to AutoCAD 2008 or earlier how do you do it?