Electronic – Eagle ‘optional’ solder pads

While I have to agree with the previous answers - you are indeed a lot better off in the long run if you route manually, I feel your question has not really been properly answered.

A quick-and-dirty workaround for you might be

• copy the component(s) to a library of your own
• add a new package, in which you put a GND rectangle around the entire component on the top layer only
• in the circuit, replace the original component with your tampered component
• let the autorouting commence
• go back to your circuit, and swap the component back to its original package.

Now, before the rotten-egg-throwing sets in, a few extra words why you should not do that.

While Eagle takes quite a bit of effort to get the hang of, it is definitely worth practicing these things on simple designs. As you advance, you will get to the point where you have to route manually, because some signals must be laid out in certain ways. There might still be workarounds for each specific problem, but you will never have practiced to place the components in a way that it is possible to route with minimal effort and losses.

SparkFun has an Eagle library that has pads for single and dual row 0.1" headers from 1 to 40 pins. Here is one of several 1x03 headers (single row, three pins):

The holes have a 40 mil diameter. The yellow square posts, which are for reference only, are drawn with 20 mil sides instead of the standard 25 mils, but expanding the sides out to 25 mils and then measuring the distance from the corners to the edge of the hole shows a 3 mil clearance.

Their library SparkFun.lbr can be downloaded here. It works with both version 5 and version 6 (I haven't tried it on version 7 yet). They also have a set of libraries in the new XML format (version 6 and later) here.

As swebere has pointed out, single and double row headers are also available in some of the libraries whhich are installed with Eagle, such as pinhead. Here is a single row 1x03 header with long pads: