SolidWorks Tips & Tricks sponsored by AppliedProduction.com

Biggest Time Saver for SolidWorks . . . The Scroll Mouse?
Your mouse plays a vital role in using SolidWorks. If you have a two button mouse with a scroll wheel, the wheel acts as a third button. SolidWorks takes full advantage of the common three button mouse to pick commands, select objects, and accept features. This allows the display of certain toolbars to be shut off. For example, one toolbar that some use often is the "View" toolbar, as shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1

Many of the commands on the "View" toolbar can be performed using a three button mouse. Better yet, if you have a scroll wheel on your mouse, the scroll wheel can be used as a middle mouse button or as a wheel in SolidWorks. Rather than using the Zoom to Area button on the "View" toolbar, with a wheel-type mouse, the middle scroll button can be used instead. Rolling the scroll wheel towards you zooms in centered on the cursor position, while rolling it away zooms out. Holding the middle mouse button, or the scroll wheel, and dragging the mouse will rotate the model, just like using the Rotate View button. If you pick an entity by clicking the middle mouse button (scroll wheel), you can then rotate the model around the selected entity by holding down the middle mouse button while moving the mouse. The Pan command can be performed by holding the Ctrl key while dragging with the middle mouse button. (In a drawing, just dragging the Ctrl key is not needed to Pan). Holding the Shift key while dragging the middle mouse button will Zoom In/Out about the screen center.

Once you are familiar with using a scroll wheel to change the position and zoom of your model, you will not need to use the "View" toolbar as often. Turning off the display of this toolbar will free up some space in your SolidWorks window. To do this, right click on the the toolbar and pick View from the list to deselect it.

Microsoft, Logitech and others produce pointing devices with more than the three standard buttons. For example, the Microsoft IntelliMouse Explorer has added two programmable thumb buttons besides the three standard buttons. Setting one of the extra buttons to Enter, Delete, Esc, Measure, or Trim may increase your productivity considerably.

The trackball is an additional input device that allows you to just spin a ball to move the cursor. There is also a finger version that you might like to check out. 3DConnexion has a lot of input devices that add quite of few options to the idea of two-handed power. The SpaceNavigator is a very simple device that gives you the ability of rotating, spinning, panning, and zooming documents within SolidWorks. The SpacePilotor the SpaceExplorer give you more buttons that you can program to meet your needs. The concept is to reduce some of the movements you are currently doing with one hand, allowing you to use both hands to work faster.

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