Copy Settings wizard - SOLIDWORKS Tutorial

- [Instructor] One tool that I've found very handy over the years is the Copy Settings Wizard. As you move to different companies or as your administrators update your SOLIDWORKS seats, you want to make sure that all the settings that you've done to the GUI, the toolbars, all of your shortcuts and hotkeys are all maintained inside of SOLIDWORKS as you move back and forth. So if we go down to the Start menu, scroll down to SOLIDWORKS Tools, and then select the Copy Settings Wizard, we will open it up. And you can see here there's two options, it's pretty straightforward. You're either going to save the current settings that you have or you're going to pull up settings that you've saved and restore them on a new installation, for example. So let's go ahead and save the settings we've currently created. I'm going to go ahead and click Next. You'll see here we've given options about what we want to save. So you can save part of it, you can save just a small portion of it, it's really up to you. Up here at the top you'll see that it automatically goes to a specific location on your hard drive. I usually just move this to the desktop, so that I can see it. And if I've got to copy it really quick to move on another machine, let's say I'm going to be doing a presentation on somebody else's machine and I want to have my settings, if I've got it right there in the desktop, I can just pull it up whenever I need it. I'm going to go ahead and click Save. Go down here and I'm going to keep all of these options selected. Click Finish. And now it tells me that the SOLIDWORKS settings have been written to that location, and we can see here on the screen that it's popped up on my desktop. I'm going to go ahead and click OK, and now we have our settings. Now let's say that we want to restore these settings on a new installation. You simply right click on this file, copy and paste it onto a flash drive, or whatever media you want to use to transfer it, and then once you're there, again, with SOLIDWORKS closed, you're going to go to the Start menu, scroll down to SOLIDWORKS Tools, select the Copy Settings Wizard, and select Restore instead of Save Settings. We're going to click Next. You can see here that it's automatically selected a file on top. If you have a single SOLIDWORKS setting file on your computer, most likely it's going to just pull it up automatically, but, if not, you can click on Browse and navigate to it. You can see here ours is on the desktop still. I'm going to go ahead and click Open, and it's going to restore the following settings. Now, because this is a new installation, I didn't have any keyboard shortcuts that were specific or saved view, so it's only including this information. I'm going to go ahead and click Next. You have to decide now if you want these settings to be for a specific user. If you're using Active Directory or various logins, user logins, on your window seat, or if you want it to be for everyone on the computer. For right now, I'm just going to use current user, because these are just my settings. I don't want them to affect anybody else who wants to use this machine in the future. I go ahead and click Next. And as part of this operation, you can choose for SOLIDWORKS Copy Settings Wizard to create a new backup of your settings, just in case, so you've got that fresh copy backup on your hard drive. Let's say, for example, that you've gone from SOLIDWORKS 2018 to SOLIDWORKS 2019. Your old backup of your settings might be for 2018. You might want to save a new version for 2019, and you can do that here. Go ahead and click Finish. You'll see that it's done so. And, again, we've created a new backup on the desktop. When you're done, you just hit OK. And when you go back into SOLIDWORKS, you'll see that all of your customized settings are there.