Customize command ribbon and GUI - SOLIDWORKS Tutorial

- [Narrator] As we walk through the various SolidWorks customizations that are available to us, it only makes sense that we begin with the command ribbon and the user interface. Starting with a default setup, looking from left to right, we find the feature tree, above that the command ribbon, which you might recognize the phrase command ribbon from Microsoft Office products, they also call this area on the top of the screen the command ribbon. And then in the right, we find the various task panes. For this video, we're going to focus just on the command ribbon and the task pane. So I'm going to start with the task pane because that has the fewest options for customization available. Right now you can see that there are several tabs available on the task pane on the right. Now you can choose to hide this, by unpinning the auto show and then when you click in the middle of the screen that'll hide to the side, or you can lock it, by clicking down on the auto show pin and locking it into place. You can also click on the settings here and reach this customize task pane tabs. I'm going to X out of this, you can also right click on any of the tabs here, and hit customize, and it'll bring this menu up as well. Here you can decide which one of these tabs you want to see. So for example, if you're not interested in what's going on with the SolidWorks forums, you can turn that tab off and you can see that it disappears over here on the right side. So again, I'm going to toggle this on and off and you can see the tab disappears. So this is one way that you can customize your interface. More importantly, on the top we have the command ribbon. Now this is where we find all of our functions and features that we're going to pull up generally. You can go to the drop downs as well from the top and hunt through and find features. You can also use the search up here, change it to commands, and search for features here as well. But generally, you're going to be clicking on buttons on this command ribbon and activating them for the functions you want to use on your model. Now the first thing that you want to do, is customize which tabs are available to you on the command ribbon. So by default we get: feature, sketch, markup; this is now available in SolidWorks 2020 so if you have SolidWorks 2019 this won't show up; evaluate, MBD dimensions; this again is only available if you have MBD available and then the various SolidWorks add-ins. Now if we right click, right here, we can go down to tabs, and see that all of the tabs that are currently available are activated. And it's signified by this checkbox being depressed. So let's say for example, we want to have some surfaces available, we can click on that and you see now the surfaces tab is now also activated. We can also go back and turn on things like sheet metal and weldments, these are ones that I use a lot, so I typically keep these activated. And you can see they have a default position, but you can grab the entire command manager and drag that to the right or left side, if you like, or keep it by default up at the top. You can't change the position of the various tabs but as I just showed you, you can change the position of the command ribbon by clicking down on one of the tabs and dragging it around and then depressing it in one of these little boxes here, and you'll see that it moves the whole command ribbon to that side. I'm going to do that one more time and drag and drop it on the top. Now once we have the various tabs available that we want, you can also right click again inside of the command ribbon and go down to customize. By going to the command's tab and customize, we find here all of the features that are available inside of SolidWorks. You can go through here and literally drag and drop commands to the various tabs. So for example, and you can see here that highlighted in red, are the various tabs that we're not using. You can customize them now as well. But I'm going to focus on the sketch tab. I like to have the sketch picture feature available to me when I'm working in sketches and have it handy. So I'm going to go down to the category and find sketch, when I click on that, all of the sketch buttons are now available. I'm going to go down to sketch picture, I'm going to left mouse button click, and drag this over to the command manager and you can see that it has that little cursor icon right to the left showing where it's going to drop that feature, and as I drag along, I can move it to various positions. But I like to leave the default icons where they are and simply add to them to the right. So now I'm going to let go of my left mouse button and it's going to drop the sketch picture feature onto the screen. Now if you decide over time that you don't want to have a feature available on your command ribbon, you can simply with the customize window open, left mouse button click, on that feature, and drag it back into the window here and you'll see that it removes it. And you can do this as well with other features that you may not want. So shaded contours for example or rapid sketch you may not want those, and you can simply grab them and drag them back in. It doesn't have to be into the specific category that relates to them but you have to have the customize window open and have the command tab activated to remove those. So these are just a few ways that you can customize these interfaces, but these are the best ways to really increase the availability of the buttons that you want to use and give you full access to all the features without having to dig down into the various menus from up here above. When you're done with that, just click OK, and you can go back to work.