Annoying problem with panels

[TG91]

I have developed an annoying problem with Altium at the moment which is hopefully as simple as clicking one button to change it.

When I open a new panel, properties, sch library, components etc, they open up merged together and I have to close them and only open one at a time.

How do I get it back to where I have a list of panels that can be opened with a single click?

[TG91]

Worked it out! (I think) It was to do with how the panels were docked, I dragged each panel out and back to the side on its own and now they seem to be working as intended.

[T3sl4co1l]

Drag the title bar of the panel around the screen, you'll see hotspots where it can be dropped (or avoid them for free floating).

Also if you want it to stay unrolled, hit the "pin" button on the top right corner.

Tim

[voltsandjolts]

Yeh, the new layout paradigm does take some getting used to.
Sometimes I still miss AD15 that I used for years and liked it, with its pop-up dialogs. RIP!

[PlainName]

Once I get the panels how I like them I save the setup so it can be reloaded if they get messed up again. And, of course, once you start doing that you can have different setups depending on what you're doing (browsing vs designing, for instance).

[harrybyy]

The behaviour where it switches from the having panels nicely tabbed to having them all stacked and visible at once has been driving me nuts for years!  I've been tempted to roll back from AD21 to Protel for Windows 3.0!
Altium's online help on the subject has been somewhat lacking. 

Fortunately a YouTuber recently mentioned holding the SHIFT key down while clicking and dragging the title bar of one panel out of the group.
Drag it out near the centre of the screen, avoiding the arrow icons for docking to screen edges.
Then try dragging the panel back to the center of a screen edge and have it restore the Tabbed panel layout.

To add further confusion, after you drag a panel to the centre, the active display view may flip to another mode or file (eg if editing a Library, it may flip to shematic editor view).  This will make some panels like the SCH Library panel disappear from view until you switch back to your library file, etc.

I haven't figured out how to force a tabbed group of panels to change into a merged group, but then I have never found a need to do this!

[tooki]

One huge “gotcha”: the dragging behavior of stacked panels depends on where in the title bar you drag!! If you drag the actual text of a panel’s title, you drag only that panel. If you drag the empty space in a panel’s title bar, you drag the entire stacked panel group.

[Pseudobyte]

Yeh, the new layout paradigm does take some getting used to.
Sometimes I still miss AD15 that I used for years and liked it, with its pop-up dialogs. RIP!

You can still make it do the popups if you really want to.