I don’t remember how or why I came across it, but a while back I found this interesting little chart.
Credit: xkcd.com/1205
For me, it was surprising to see how much time you can invest in saving mere seconds on a repetitive task and still have it be ‘worth it’ in the long run. It was also validating for me looking back at every time I’ve been chastised by a boss for trying to make my own processes more efficient.
Over the years, I have found many shortcuts that can save loads of time by shaving seconds (or more) off highly repetitive tasks in SolidWorks. After using SW for 5+ years, and thoroughly searching the internet, I have come up with a list the top three features of SolidWorks that will save time on repetitive tasks.
Let’s get right into it.
The three topics I want to go over are: Mouse Gestures, the ‘S’ menu, and keyboard hotkeys. This may offend some people, but I won’t be including macros in this article. For me, they just aren’t something that I have delved into enough because of sheer laziness, but maybe one of you can correct my ways.
Mouse Gestures
If I had to pick one thing about using SolidWorks that I would consider ‘fun’, this would be it! You know you’re a nerd when you get excited about mouse gestures, but they save incredible amounts of time and are fun to ‘play’ with.
An example one group of 8 gestures.
You can navigate to the mouse gestures options pane by going to the gear icon in the top toolbar and clicking the drop down arrow next to it. From the drop down menu, go to Customize, and then select the Mouse Gesture tab at the top.
Here you can choose how many gestures you want to use (4 or 8) and bind those gestures to specific actions. You can have four groups of 8 different gestures, but only one group is active at a time. The groups are Part, Assembly, Drawing, and Sketch. Depending on the context, SolidWorks knows which group to use. I make use of all 8 gestures because I think they are an amazing time saver.
Get used to going to the gear drop down menu because it is full of goodies.
To figure out what commands I want to bind, I ask myself this one question. What are the main functions/actions I want to perform inside of a sketch versus outside of a sketch. My answer to the question is: Outside of a sketch I normally just want to orient the part, and inside of a sketch, I use certain sketch commands constantly. I find myself using the same commands when in Part and Assembly contexts, so those two groups are identical. There is also the added benefit of only having to memorize three groups of gestures instead of four.
‘S’ Menu
Second of the list of my favorite time savers is what I call the ‘S’ Menu. I don’t know what the proper name for it is, or if there even is one, but this little thing is great! At the very least, the name is straight forward. Press the ‘S’ key, and it pops up right at your cursor. Just like the gestures, there are 4 different ‘S’ menus that will pop up depending on the context (Part, Assembly, Drawing, and Sketch).
Right Click for ‘Customize…’
To customize this menu, simply press ‘S’ to bring up the menu and right click anywhere inside the box and select Customize. You can get to the same page by going to the Settings drop down menu -> Customize -> Shortcut Bars. For these commands, I put everything that I commonly use that wouldn’t fit on the mouse gestures. Mouse gestures are things I use ALL the time, the ‘S menu is for everything that I use most of the time. To keep things clean, simple, and easy to use, I limit myself to around 12-15 commands. If you have too many icons, the clutter is counterproductive and can slow you down.
Keyboard Shortcuts
To get to this settings page, go to the Settings drop down menu (I told you to get used to it) -> Customize -> Keyboard. Here you can bind similar commands as you did with mouse gestures and the ‘S menu’. I find myself using the keyboard shortcuts as a bit of a catch all for random commands that didn’t fit or make sense elsewhere. I don’t go overboard on bindings, but the ones I have, I use dozens of times a day or more.
My favorite key binding is one that I don’t think would be obvious to most people. Under the “Other” category, there is a command called “Move Selection Breadcrumbs “. Breadcrumbs is the name SW uses for the small menus that pop up near your cursor. Instead of having to go to the upper right corner of the screen every time you want to exit a sketch, confirm a fillet, or confirm/exit any other functions, I simply press B on my keyboard and the green check mark comes right to my cursor!
Actually, I don’t even press B on my keyboard. I have it bound to a button on my mouse… which dovetails nicely into something else worth briefly mentioning: customizing your mouse.
I have a Logitech G 700s mouse, and it has a few extra buttons on it that you can program to do any number of things. I generally bind simple thing like volume up/down, and for SolidWorks, I bind just one button to my most used keystroke, the ‘B’ mentioned above. This saves me fractions of a second on what is probably THE single most used command in SolidWorks.
Summary
I hope I have given you some useful tips for saving time in SolidWorks. I have shown you how I use mouse gestures for the most commonly used commands, how the ‘S menu’ works, and the types of commands you can bind to keys. With all these tips, surely you can save some time in the long run.
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