BIM week 1(new)

I have had experience with mechanical drafting in high school. Later i took classes in autocad 2007 and architectural desktop. Arch desktop reminds me of revit in a number of ways, primarily the way one draws lines then defines wall types. Also in the way it can generate documents, although i believe revit will add in symbols to drawings, whereas in cad or architectural desktop the symbols are elements which are constructed of lines. The various views in revit seem like viewports generated by scripts in cad. The nestleing of information within objects was somthing done in cad but it seems streamlined i revit. There are no Xrefs to keep track of. in short alot of things which could be done in cad with scripts,blocks,and xrefs are handled "under the hood" i revit. I look forward to using revit in studio to rapidly generate drawings as well as trying out the rendering engine. I'm familiar with sketchup, but revit "feels" different than cad or sketchup. The active tool bars are something i'll have to get used to. I wonder if there is a way to generate a custom tool pallet which could always be called up, with non applicable tools "grayed out"and applicable tools available, regardless of which object or tool is selected at any time.