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This blog post is the seventh in a series of technical tips about the SolidWorks User Interface. Call the series “Everything you wanted to know about —–, but were afraid to ask”. The first few posts will be about the various types of toolbars available in the system. This post is about the SolidWorks Context Toolbars.

Context Toolbars

Context Toolbars were introduced for part and assembly documents in SolidWorks 2008 to provide easier access to the most common commands/options that relate to the current selection. SolidWorks 2010 adds the Context Toolbar for Drawing documents. The following image shows an example of the context toolbar alone on the left and the context toolbar on top of the right mouse button shortcut menu on the right:

These toolbars work similar to the “Mini Toolbar” introduced in Microsoft Office 2007; on selection, they show up partially transparent and become opaque if you move your mouse onto them or disappear when you move your mouse away from them (assuming you don’t want to use the toolbar). The context toolbar is positioned very close to the mouse when making selections in the FeatureManager tree (similar to the Mini Toolbar in Office) but is positioned further away when making selections in the graphics area so it is easier to make multiple selections of geometry without moving your mouse away to dismiss the context toolbar first. The context toolbar also disappears if you hit the CTRL key to make multiple selections and comes back when you let go of the CTRL key.

The default behavior is that the Context Toolbar shows when you select an object with the left mouse button. It also shows at the top of the shortcut menu if you use your right mouse button to make a selection (or after you have made a selection). You can customize when the Context Toolbar is used through Tools, Customize, Toolbars; choosing to use it for left click (selection), right click (shortcut menu), for both, or for neither.

The buttons shown on the context toolbars are hard coded and cannot be customized by the user. SolidWorks has chosen to put the most commonly used commands from the shortcut menus onto the Context Toolbars for easier access. It takes a little bit of time to learn the icons, but many users find this approach much more efficient once learned. There are tooltips on the icons to help describe what each button does. Another benefit of the context toolbars is that the icons are in a more predictable location than on the standard shortcut menus and can be used with less “hunting”. Once users become familiar with the icons and their placement, they can often even use the buttons by “muscle memory” instead of visual scanning for their location.

If users see anything I have missed about Context Toolbars in this blog post, please comment and I will try to update the blog.

This post was submitted by Jim Wilkinson

This blog post is the sixth in a series of technical tips about the SolidWorks User Interface. Call the series “Everything you wanted to know about —–, but were afraid to ask”. The first few posts will be about the various types of toolbars available in the system. This post is about the SolidWorks Shortcut Bar (“S” Key).

The Shortcut Toolbar (“S” Key)

The Shortcut Bar is a user customizable toolbar that was introduced in SolidWorks 2008. The intention of the Shortcut Bar is to allow users access to commonly used commands in different “environments” with very little mouse movement. There are four versions of the Shortcut Bar, one each for parts, assemblies, drawings, and sketches (the default Shortcut Bar for each environment are shown below):

To invoke the Shortcut Bar, simply hit the S key and the Shortcut Bar will popup right next to the mouse. The Shortcut Bar disappears as soon as you select a command from it or click anywhere else in the SolidWorks application window. The keyboard shortcut used to invoke the Shortcut Bar can be redefined in the Others category in Tools, Customize, Keyboard if desired.

To customize what commands are on the Shortcut Bar, when the Shortcut Bar is up, choose Customize from the right mouse button shortcut menu on the Shortcut Bar as shown below:

The Customize dialog will open to the Commands tab and you can customize buttons on/off of the Shortcut Bar like any other toolbar. When the Customize dialog is up, you can also resize the shape of the Shortcut Bar by dragging any one of the edges. Repeat the procedure in each of the document modes to customize the four versions of the Shortcut Bar.

The Shortcut Bar is a good interface for users who want access to many commands with little mouse movement, yet don’t want to have to memorize many individual keyboard shortcuts. Many power users have adopted the Shortcut Bar as their primary interface to accessing commands, hiding the CommandManager and regular toolbars so they have a very large area for their model display.

If users see anything I have missed about the Shortcut Bar in this blog post, please comment and I will try to update the blog.

This post was submitted by Jim Wilkinson .

This blog post is the fourth in a series of technical tips about the SolidWorks User Interface. Call the series “Everything you wanted to know about —–, but were afraid to ask”. The first few posts will be about the various types of toolbars available in the system. This post is about the SolidWorks Heads-Up View Toolbar.

Heads-Up View Toolbar

The Heads-Up View Toolbar was added at the top of the document graphics area in SolidWorks 2008 to provide easy access to viewing functions that affect the graphics area. Below is an image of the default Heads-Up View Toolbar.

In SolidWorks 2008 and 2009, this toolbar contains a limited set of viewing commands and which commands are currently visible on the toolbar is controlled by using the right mouse button shortcut menu on the toolbar. To completely hide the toolbar in SolidWorks 2008 or 2009, you must deselect all of the buttons in the visibility list. If you have hidden the entire toolbar to make it visible again, move your mouse to the very center of the top of the graphics area and hit the right mouse button to get the visibility menu.

Starting with SolidWorks 2010, this toolbar has been upgraded to be consistent with normal toolbars; hide/show visibility of the entire toolbar is controlled in the same manner as regular toolbars and customization is also handled in the same manner (i.e. any button can be added/removed from the toolbar through the use of Tools, Customize). The only differences between this toolbar and a regular toolbar are: 1) It cannot be undocked. 2) Visibility control is stored twice; once for drawings and once for parts/assemblies. 3) Customization of what buttons are shown is stored twice instead of once; once for drawings and once for parts/assemblies.

This toolbar shows in the currently “active” viewport of the graphics area (of which there is only one by default so it is always visible). To activate a viewport, click in the viewport.

When we added the Heads-Up View Toolbar, we also added some new flyout toolbar buttons to make some of the most common viewing functions easier to access. These flyouts can be placed on any toolbar (not just the Heads-Up View Toolbar) by dragging them from Tools, Customize, Commands, View. The specific view flyouts that we added in SolidWorks 2008 are:

• View Orientation- This flyout has all of the standard view orientations, user defined orientations, and options for splitting/linking the viewports. The standard views are shown in a common orientation that is easier to interpret than the linear layout of the View Orientation dialog or the Standard Views toolbar. Below is an image of the view orientation flyout shown with two user defined views on it.

Display Style- This flyout consolidates the five different display styles into one flyout, occupying less space. The user can still customize the interface to have the individual display style buttons on their toolbar if they use certain styles more often than others and want direct access with one click instead of two.

Hide/Show Items – This flyout performs the same function as selecting items to hide/show in the top level View menu, but overcomes the number one complaint about the menu which is you cannot select/deselect multiple items without invoking the menu multiple times. Unfortunately, the single select behavior is a behavior of Microsoft menus which cannot be overridden, so we introduced the Hide/Show Items flyout as an improved method to hide/show multiple display items. The image below was taken in SolidWorks 2010 where starting with Beta3, the icon in the lower right corner is used for toggling dimension names on/off (this is now a per document setting instead of a system setting).

Apply Scene- This flyout was added to easily change between different background scenes. You can cycle to the next scene in the list by pushing the icon portion of the button or you can choose a specific scene by using the flyout portion. Users often ask how to make their background white and the image below shows the “Plain White” background selected. Note that scenes are per document, so if you don’t want to use different scenes for different documents (i.e. you want a plain white or other background for ALL documents), go to Tools, Options, System Options, Colors and choose from one of the other options under “Background appearance”.

Display Settings – This flyout contains three less commonly used display settings (again, consolidated into one flyout to save space). Again, the user can customize the interface to have these individual display style buttons on their toolbar if desired.

If users see anything I have missed about the Heads-Up View Toolbar in this blog post, please comment and I will try to update the blog.

This post was submitted by Jim Wilkinson.

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Mouse over to the top left corner to watch in full screen mode. More SolidWorks video tips? Check out our SolidWorks Learning Center.