Use the Recent tab in the AutoCAD Blocks palette

Opening the Blocks palette and finding Recent

Type BLOCKSPALETTE and Enter, or on the ribbon go to Insert tab > Block > Insert and the palette opens. Across the top you will see tabs: Current Drawing, Recent (sometimes labelled Recently Used), Favorites and Libraries. Click Recent.

The Recent tab shows a thumbnail grid of the most recently inserted blocks across your sessions, not just the current drawing. That is the key difference from Current Drawing — Recent remembers blocks you brought in from other files and palettes too, so it is a running shortlist of what you have actually been placing.

Re-inserting a block from Recent

Click a thumbnail once to pick it up, then click in the drawing to place it; or right-click the thumbnail and choose Insert. While the block is on your cursor you can respond to the prompts for rotation and scale exactly as with any insert. Double-clicking generally inserts at the last-used settings.

Before you place, set the options at the bottom of the palette — Insertion Point, Scale, Rotation, Repeat Placement and Explode. For laying out a run of identical doors or chairs, tick Repeat Placement so you can keep clicking to drop instance after instance without reopening the palette each time.

Reading the thumbnails and tooltips

Hover a Recent thumbnail and AutoCAD shows the block name and, where relevant, the source. This matters when two blocks look similar at thumbnail size — a 900 mm and a 1000 mm wide door can be hard to tell apart as tiny icons, but the tooltip name disambiguates them.

Switch the palette's view between large icons, small icons and a details list using the view control at the top right of the palette. The details list is useful when names matter more than appearance, for example when you are picking between several near-identical furniture variants.

Setting scale and rotation as you place

The placement options you set apply to the next insert from Recent. If your blocks are millimetre blocks dropped into a millimetre template, leave Scale at 1 and they land true. For a block you always orient the same way — say a table pushed against a wall — type the rotation into the Rotation field so every drop arrives pre-turned.

If a block comes in mis-sized from Recent, the fix is the same as anywhere else in AutoCAD: it is a units issue, not the palette's fault. Check UNITS / INSUNITS so the drawing and block agree, and the next insert from Recent will scale correctly.

Keeping the Recent list useful

The Recent list is capped and rolls over, so old blocks drop off as you insert new ones. If it fills with one-off blocks you will not place again, right-click a thumbnail and choose Remove from Recent List (or Clear) to prune it back to the components you are actually repeating.

If a block earns a permanent place in your workflow, do not rely on Recent to keep it — right-click it and Add to Favorites. Recent is a short memory; Favorites is the shelf you curate deliberately. Using the two together gives you a fast shortlist plus a stable library.

When to use Recent versus the other tabs

Reach for Recent when you are mid-task and repeating blocks you just used — it is the lowest-friction way to keep dropping the same door or chair. Use Current Drawing when you want a block already defined in this file, even if you have not inserted it this session. Use Libraries when you are pulling something fresh from a folder of DWG files, and Favorites for your hand-picked staples.

The practical habit is: browse once from Libraries or Current Drawing, then live in Recent for the rest of the layout. That single switch removes most of the folder-hunting that slows block-heavy drawings down.

One more workflow detail worth knowing: Recent reflects what you insert regardless of how you inserted it. Drop a block by dragging a DWG from File Explorer, by INSERT, or from a tool palette, and it still lands in Recent afterwards. So even if you prefer other insertion routes, the Recent tab quietly builds a shortlist of your real working set in the background, ready the moment you decide the palette is the faster way to keep going.