So if the Menu Browser isn’t much use for browsing menus, what is it good for? Searching menus, for one thing. Let’s say you’re a very occasional 3D user trying to make a 3D model look pretty. You want to access commands for placing lights, putting the sun in the right place, and changing visual style settings. You don’t really know where to look in the Ribbon or menus. What to do? Click on the red A and just start typing what you think the command is called. With a bit of luck, the appropriate menu item will present itself and you can click on it.

This video shows three successful Menu Browser searches by typing in “light”, “sun” and “vis”.

The whole thing is over in 14 seconds. That’s quite impressive in comparison to a manual click-and-hunt search. It’s not foolproof, though. It’s a menu search, not a command search. That means the command you’re after has to be in the menus before it can be found. If you type in something like “osnap” or “oops” you’ll be out of luck, even though they are both valid AutoCAD commands.