Friday February 7, 2014 at 1:37pm
Last week I wanted to go through my settings and customise them. I hadn’t done this in a while and didn’t feel like my current set up was working for me. You can get to the customise menu by right clicking the command manager, going right down to the bottom of the list and choosing ‘Customize’. Alternatively you can use the Tools menu with Customize near the bottom.
The window that appears houses options to customise pretty much every aspect of SolidWorks.
‘Toolbars’ can be switched off or on and will add a small menu of commands related to a given topic to SolidWorks.
‘Shortcut Bars’ allow you to customise the icons that you see when pushing the ‘S’ key on the keyboard.
‘Commands’ houses all of the different commands in SolidWorks. Once you have found the one you want left click and drag the icon from the Customise window to your Command Manager.
‘Menus’ refer to the pull down menus across the top of SolidWorks and generally these should be left alone.
‘Keyboard’ will allow you to create your own keyboard shortcuts. You can choose only to show commands with shortcuts assigned which is very useful to see what shortcuts already exist.
‘Mouse Gestures’ occur when you hold the right mouse button and then move the mouse in a given direction. By default this changes the view but can be set to any command you like.
When perusing this dialogue, you may even find a command that you had either forgotten about or had never seen before! Many of our customers like to input dimension values as they are drawing the geometry. So, as you draw a line you can type 100 and it will make the line 100mm long. You can turn this on in the Options > System Options > Sketch and then tick ‘Enable on screen numeric input on entity creation’. Now it may be that you wish to toggle this option on and off to get the best of both worlds, well looking at the Commands Tab i found an icon for it- this can then be dragged to my toolbar as a permanent addition.
Give it a go!
By Peter Harkness
Applications Engineer