Wednesday, July 8, 2009

My newest custom hotkeys... for Drawings!

I'm a bit of a nonconformist. I like to do things my way. So I guess it's good that SolidWorks has a lot of customization options. I'm not a big keyboard guy, having grown up in the Mouse Age in terms of CAD, but I'm a big fan of Alt-Tab and Ctrl-Tab to switch applications or open documents, and I've got a handful of custom hotkeys that I like. Well, I just found 2 more.

I was looking purposelessly at the pull-down menus in SolidWorks the other day and found View - Next Sheet, and View - Previous Sheet. I tried them out in a multi-sheet Drawing and sure enough, they allowed a nice switch between Drawing Sheets! (Double-clicking the FeatureManager is SO MUCH WORK!) But who would want to pull these commands out of a menu? That's so 20 years ago.

So I went on over to Tools - Customize - Keyboard, I did a little search for "sheet" and found the two View commands I had just discovered. "I wonder if you can assign a hotkey to PgUp and PgDn?" I thought.

Yes, you can. It shows up as "Prior" and "Next" within the Customize Keyboard dialog.

So now I've got the PgUp key and the PgDn key to walk up and down through the Sheets in a Drawing. Slick.

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