Shortcuts and other Time Saving Hints

Here at Solid Solutions we love little quirks that save us time so I will run down some of the few that time after time leave our customers asking ‘how did you do that?'

1. Scrolling through open documents

Everyone has been there, it’s 3 o'clock you haven’t closed anything down since you started working and you can’t remember which of the 14 similarly named  open files is which.

Fortunately using CTRL+ TAB you can scroll in between all of your open documents, conveniently providing you with a screenshot so you can see which model you’re about to open as well as an icon highlighting whether it is a part, assembly or drawing.

2. Creating your own keyboard shortcuts

SOLIDWORKS provides a whole bunch of keyboard shortcuts by default, if you are unsure as to what they are you can right mouse button click on your command manager and scroll to the bottom of the long list and click customise.

Once in this menu if you click on the Keyboard shortcuts tab you can see all of the commands that have shortcuts attached to them and print off a list.

A good idea is to assign shortcuts to tools you use frequently saving time scrolling through menus, personally I like to assign shortcuts to dimension and mate tools.

To add these shortcuts just find the command in the drop down list then in the box next to it click the keys you want to assign and presto your shortcut has been created! 

View Blog on Customising SOLIDWORKS Toolbars

3. Command Search Bar

One of the great things about SOLIDWORKS are the vast amount of things you can do with the software, unfortunately this means remembering where everything is.

As we are no elephants we may often forget where commands are, this is a common call to the support desk when nine times out of ten the customer knows exactly the name of the command that they are looking for!

Fortunately there is a tool to resolve this - the command search bar!

4. Opening parts and assemblies directly from bills of materials

Once you've got to the end of creating your drawing and you realise that a few components have properties missing or you can’t work out what that component is, instead of finding it through your folders a little known tip is that using your right mouse button you can open it directly from the BOM. 

Here are some more ways Russell has found to open files from drawings.

Chris Morrogh

Applications Engineer