SolidWorks Tips and Tricks: Add your Personal Touch to SolidWorks

Add Your Personal Touch to SolidWorks - Part 2
Another way to add your personal touch is using PropertyManager skins. A skin is just a tiled bitmap image applied as a background of the PropertyManager.

To do this, click the Options button in the “Standard” toolbar, or pull down the “Tools” menu and pick Options.

In the System Options dialog box, on the System Options tab, click Colors. Under Color scheme settings, pull down the PropertyManager skin menu and pick clouds, as shown in Figure 1. Then, in the System Options dialog box, click the OK.

In the FeatureManager tree area, click on the PropertyManager tab. The background of the PropertyManager is now clouds, as shown in Figure 2.

This option is great to add a personal touch to your SolidWorks. SolidWorks supplies some sample skins to choose from in the skins folder, <SolidWorks Install Directory>/data/skins. You can choose one of these, or you can even create your own custom skin.

SolidWorks requires the skin image to be a bitmap file. When editing or creating a bitmap image, consider its size. The width of the FeatureManager tree area snaps to about 190 pixels, so that is a good size to make the skin image. Once a bitmap is ready for use, put it in the <SolidWorks Install Directory>/data/skins.

Besides the background image of a skin, you can even create your own PropertyManager customized buttons. Customizing the buttons requires photo editing software. The easiest way to create your own buttons is just to copy an existing skin and modify the bitmap image copies. The best way to do that is to copy similar buttons and rename the files in Windows Explorer with a new skin name. It is necessary that the file name has the exact skin name, followed by two underscores, then the button function (cancel, help, ok, pin), and then the file extension. Otherwise, the default buttons will be used. For example, if the skin is named skin.bmp, the cancel button for that skin would be named skin__cancel.bmp. Make sure that each button is renamed properly.

Once all the files are saved in the skins folder, the skin will appear in the PropertyManager skin pull down menu for your use.

Share your favorite skins with fellow SolidWorks users. Email them to skins@sheetmetalguy.com and we will upload them to the website for all to share.

SolidWorks supplies some sample skins to choose from, or download custom SolidWorks skins here.

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