Imagine that you have lots of layers in a drawing and you need to show your drawing in various states, such as a state in which only walls and doors are visible, another state in which only walls and dimensions are visible, and so on. To get these states, you can hide the layers that you don't want and keep only required layers active. But doing this again and again would become repetitive and would take time every time you had to change the state of a layer. To make the states of these layers permanent, you can use the layer states manager, which is found in the expanded Layers panel as shown in the following figure:

In our example drawing containing five layers, we will create three layer states – a state where only walls and doors are visible, another one where only walls and furniture are visible, and another one where all the layers are visible:

1. To start with this tool, we will first switch all layers on so that all the objects are visible in the drawing area.
2. Now click on the Unsaved Layer State dropdown as shown in the preceding figure.
3. Now click on the New layer state option that shows up in the expanded panel. A new window will open up where you can add a name for this layer state. Let's call this layer state All active and then click on OK to save this layer state:

4. Now turn off all the layers in the drawing except the Walls and Doors layers and then again go to the New layer state option.
5. Give your layer state a name in the next window and click OK. In this case, I will call this layer state wall-door on.
6. Once again, a new layer state will be created with your selected layers active.
7. Finally, turn off all layers except Walls and Furniture and then create a new layer state as explained in the preceding steps.

All the layer states that you make will be added to the layer states manager and you can then toggle between different layer states using the layer states manager panel, as shown in the following figure:

By toggling the layer states, you can easily and quickly switch between different states of layers.

So, with our coverage of the layer states manager, we have finished this chapter, and now, before we move on to the next chapter, let's quickly summarize the topics we have learned about.