Why can’t I see my Palette

Posted by & filed under .

If you are not seeing the palette for any application even when you toggle it on and off it’s likely that it’s location is stored off screen. This is rare, but it can happen from time to time, especially when switching between monitor configurations (i.e. plugging a laptop into external monitors and then unplugging them.

Fortunately this is a pretty easy fix, you just need to reset the stored position. Our software stores settings in xml files and there is a particular file for transient settings like this. To fix this do the following:

  1. Shut down any instances of the software that are currently running (including Revit if the software is running inside Revit).
  2. Open a new File Explorer window and type %appdata% into the address bar to get to your roaming appdata folder.
  3. Browse to the folder Revolution Design/*application*/*version*.  So if you are using Keynote Manager version 19 it would be Revolution Design/Keynote Manager/19_0.
  4. In this folder there should be an xml file with the word ‘Internal’ in it as well as one without that word in it.  For example for Keynote Manager there should be the two files ‘KMInternal_Settings.xml’ and ‘Keynote Manager_Settings.xml’; the internal one is the one you want to modify as that stores the transient settings.  The other one stores your main settings so you don’t want to mess with that one.  From here there are two options depending on your technical comfort level.
    1. If you feel comfortable editing an xml file manually you can open the file up in any xml editor.  Find the settings named ‘PaletteTop’ and ‘PaletteLeft’ and reset their value to something around 100.  This will relocate the stored palette location near the top left of the screen without changing any other settings.
    2. If you don’t fee comfortable editing xml files manually you can simply delete this file.  Note that you will lose other transient settings like recent files, etc. but you should not lose anything important.  When you restart this file will be re-created with default values including window location.
  5. Restart Revit or the application and your palette should be back in default location.