Hi all,
I was working on CD 2019 doc last weekend when my screen went black and stayed black. I waited, I hit ctrl-s to attempt to save my doc and used the power button to shut down with CD open. Yikes. I attributed this to a GPU driver failure and updated the driver and all is well on that front. However...when I opened CD again my workspace had changed to Touch from the previous setting of Default . I tried to reset CD back to the Default workspace but I no longer have that option. I repaired my installation and workspace options are as seen in the attached JPEG. CD 2019 on left and CD 2018 options on right. In addition my toolbox is now missing the star,complex star,basic shapes,arrow,flowchart,banner and callout tools.
Any thoughts on this? Thanks as usual!
I won't pretend to really know what happened here, but I'll share a little bit that I think I know about workspaces.
Your "user" workspaces are stored in .CDWS files in a CorelDRAW section of AppData/Roaming:
If you're not familiar with AppData\Roaming, you can read about it on the web. It is by default hidden in Windows. A quick way to get there is to type %AppData% into the address bar part of the file explorer (or whatever they call it these days). That will take you there without having to set Windows to show you hidden folders.
It might be worth looking there to see if those workspace files are present. If they are there, well, then perhaps one or more of them have become corrupted.
If you delete one of those "standard" .CDWS files from that folder while CorelDRAW is closed, then CorelDRAW should put a new, factory-fresh version of that workspace file there the next time that it is started.
A full uninstall/reinstall of CorelDRAW is always an option.
Thank you very much for taking the time out to respond. I had a look as you suggested and everything is there. I may go ahead and delete _default.cwds and see what happens on restart.
I called tech support and they offered to remotely dig through my machine but that gives me the heeby jeebies otherwise no suggestions on their end.
Just to insure I'm not losing my mind the menu I posted for 2019 should have an option for default workspace correct?...... or did that change in 2019 and I spaced on that fact?
Again........thanks.
I honestly don't know when/how CorelDRAW puts workspaces on that menu; I've never looked into it.
I typically access workspaces through the Options (the "Gear" icon on the main toolbar):
Have you tried using that interface to see if that works?
Yeah. I tried both. Default workspace option is not under Gear Icon menu either. I did delete the _default.cwds folder and it did replace itself but no Default workspace option in either menus and my tools are still missing.
If something else pops into your head let me know otherwise once again thanks.
The thought of tech support diddling in my machine remotely is not an option I want to entertain.
So, OK, the fresh workspace is there in the folder, but you don't see it in the menu or in the Workspaces dialog.
If I saw that, then I would be doing the full CorelDRAW uninstall/reinstall thing, and checking the "remove user files" option during the uninstall process.
If I had customized workspaces, then I would save those somewhere else first, in the hope of trying them out again later.
There may be some less-invasive surgical way to fix this, but the symptoms you describe aren't ones with which I'm familiar. Uninstall/reinstall, though, well, I'm familiar with that!
Wound up renaming the whole CorelDRAW Graphics Suite 2019 folder in %AppData% as opposed to just deleting the _default.cdws entry in the Draw>Workspace folder and that worked. New folder created, default workspace is back, tools are back and in the right locations, seems to be working fine. Thanks for jumping in here on this one.
Perhaps there was something toxic in one or more of the workspace files that was preventing CorelDRAW from getting the information it needs to show in the menu and in the dialog.
Good idea on renaming the folder. To CorelDRAW, the content doesn't exist then. I have on occasion renamed my .GMS folder there to prove that no, a problem observed was not being caused by a VBA macro.
Thanks for sharing your approach to this and the good outcome.
I'll note here that I really like my customized workspace in 2018, and that I really, really don't want to ever rebuild it from scratch for 2018. I would start over from scratch if customizing for a new version.
As insurance, I fairly often run a FreeFileSync job that maintains a mirror of the folder containing my .CDWS files. Any time that a file is updated in or deleted from the mirror, the previous version is saved in a separate folder with a time stamp appended to the filename.
If something bad were to happen to a workspace, I would just turn back time to get to a good one.
And thank you for pointing me in the right direction.