Everyone who uses LayOut uses it a little bit differently. The folks who developed LayOut understand that and created options that enable you to customize how the interface looks and works:

If you consistently work from a customized LayOut document design, you can save your basic document framework as a template. Templates are also a great way to ensure documents use the same company branding, titleblocks, or project elements. When you save a LayOut document as a template, the template contains everything that currently appears in your document, including all entities, pages, and so on. You can then add any elements that are unique to your document. To save a LayOut document as a template, follow these steps:

Whether your documents often include company branding elements or you just prefer certain shapes or styles, LayOut's scrapbooks are a handy way to store and access entities you use and reuse in your documents. In LayOut's Scrapbooks panel you'll find premade scrapbooks of arrows, cars, colors, people, signs, title blocks, and trees. You can also create your own scrapbooks for custom items, such as logos or shapes that you design.

With LayOut’s Style tool (), you can sample the style settings applied to one entity and apply those same settings to another entity. Say you remove the stroke from a rectangle and fill it with blue, as shown in the following figure. Then you decide to apply the same settings to the orange rectangle. Instead of redoing all that work, use the Style tool to accomplish the same result in two clicks.

In LayOut, layers enable you to control the entities on your document pages as follows:

In LayOut, groups are a way to keep related elements organized in the drawing area. Groups can also make selecting and copying multiple elements easier. For example, if you know you'll always want to select a text box and a shape together, make it a group so you just need to select it once.

To create a professional document, entities need to be arranged and sized just right. To help you do that, LayOut includes several tools and features, including a grid, inference cues, and an Arrange menu. When you select an entity, its bounding box has tools for moving, rotating, and scaling the entity, or you can use the keyboard or the Measurements box to enter precise changes. See the following sections for details about nudging your entities into the right position.

Whether you’re an architect, woodworker, or engineer — basically, anyone who creates construction documents — you probably need to add tables to those documents. With LayOut’s table feature, you can create and edit tables of text in LayOut or import table data from an Excel file (.xlsx) or a .csv file. In the sections that follow, you discover how to create tables and edit their spacing, rows, columns, and cells. Also, find out how to format a table and table text.

LayOut's Linear Dimension () and Angular Dimension () tools can label a distance or angle. In the following figure, you see an example of a linear and an angular dimension.

With LayOut's Label tool (), you create a label entity with a text box, a line (technically called a leader), and an arrow or endpoint pointing to a specific item in the drawing area. The following figure illustrates a few ways you can customize labels: