From the course: SOLIDWORKS: Advanced Sketching

Customizing the S key for sketching - SOLIDWORKS Tutorial

From the course: SOLIDWORKS: Advanced Sketching

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Customizing the S key for sketching

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- [Instructor] If you want to improve your work flow, when using sketching features, one of the good things to leverage is the S key or the flyout toolbar. So if you go and start a new sketch for example and you're in here sketching some features you can go up to the command ribbon and pull all those features one by one. Or, I'm going to hit escape here to get out of that feature, if you hit your S key, you will get what's known as the flyout toolbar, a lot of people just refer to it as the S key toolbar. But here you can see all of the relevant features that you might want to pull up for sketching. But it's not all inclusive, so this is great to have on its own but if we want to customize this, what we can do is go up to the command ribbon, right click, go to customize and if you go to shortcut bars tab, you'll notice right away that I have the flyout toolbar selected in the toolbar dropdown, that's going to give me the option to select part, assembly, drawing, or sketch shortcut toolbars. This is the S key toolbar that we pulled up. Now let's says for example I want to add the sketch picture feature because I use that a lot. I'll take pictures, drop them into my sketches, then use them to outline something roughly when maybe I don't need exact dimensions. So I'll go ahead and go down to the sketch toolbar, find the sketch picture feature, I can left mouse button click and hold that down and then I simply drag that over to the menu and drop it in the position I want. I'm going to add it here at the end, which is indicated by the cursor, let go and now it's added to that option. So if I look over here in my shortcut toolbar, it's already available. So I'm going to hit OK, click on the scree and hit S and you can see here sketch picture is now available. Now you don't have to limit yourself to just adding sketch, specific features. You can edit these toolbars to have any feature on them. You just simply drag and drop it in and then if you don't want it you can just drag it off and it'll delete it off of the toolbar. So don't think that you're locked into having this icon here once it's there, I can just grab it again with my left mouse button click and drag it over and you'll see the little X come up and then it goes away. So pretty easy to manipulate that toolbar, but it's very handy to use because you can limit how far you're going across your screen with the mouse moving back and forth. Instead I can just click S, pull up dimensions, start working right away, do things like that, add other features and I don't have to go across the screen to pick one of the features.

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