Do the Workaround!

Sounds kind of like some crazy dance from the 70′s doesn’t it? Well after I found this workaround I was dancing around my office like it was 1972!

Ever since switching to SolidWorks 2009 I have noticed that I have been unable to resize the shortcut bar (“S” key) when I was customizing it. This caused me to get kind of frustrated because it would not allow me to properly position my commands how I wanted them. So I figured that I would post the question on solidjott.com and see if anyone else was having the same issue. Now, if you haven’t already checked out solidjott.com you need to do it now (well on 2nd thought finish reading this post and then check it out). Anyways, I posted the following question and realized that others were experiencing the same issue as I was.

            

hey everyone! i am running 64 bit vista ultimate with solidworks 2009 sp2.0 ev 64 bit. has anyone experienced the inability to resize the shortcut bar with these settings? it is not a early visibility issue because i have had this problem since sp0.0. please let me know, it is not a show stopper but can be kind of annoying!

After I got some comments from others that were having the same problem I started to look into it a little bit more and found a service request in the SolidWorks Knowledge Base that explained this problem and a workaround to fix it. If you run a dual monitor setup (which most do probably) you probably will experience this problem if you are running SolidWorks on the secondary monitor. In order to resize your shortcut bar you will now need to move SolidWorks over to the primary monitor, resize it, then move SolidWorks back over to your secondary monitor. VOILA, it works! Now I hope that SolidWorks fixes this in an upcoming service pack but for the time being you will need to do this workaround.

Now that we got that out of the way, go check out SolidJott. It is an awesome new SolidWorks Q&A site that includes an add on that will allow you to use it right inside the SolidWorks Task Pane. What that means is that you will no longer have to switch between SolidWorks and the web if you are experiencing a problem of sorts and are looking for some feedback from fellow SolidWorks users. Ben Eadie has done an unbelievable job with this site and add on and deserves all the credit. Solidjott.com is often populated with quite a few of the SolidWorks power users that are chomping at the bit to answer your question or concern.