Where Have You Been All My Life? Lesser Known Functions

So everyone has probably returned from SolidWorks WORLD now and is trying to get back in the day to day grind, at least for the next 345 days until SolidWorks WORLD 2010 in Anaheim.  Well, I am back at it also and stumbled across a function today that I can’t remember if I knew existed or not but for sure do not use.  Here it is, the ability to rotate around a vertex, edge, or a face.  Now I may just be falling off my rocker, a little case of relapse after a week off but I accidentally stumbled into this command and really liked it.

So you are either saying to yourself right now, this dude has lost it and better retake his essentials course or how the heck do you do it?  Well, no matter what you are saying I am going to share it with you, so here is how to do it.  To start with you need to know about the middle mouse button (mmb) click option.  Your mouse probably has this option as long as 1) it has a middle mouse button and 2) it didn’t come across on the pond with the pilgrims.  If I were to guess, a lot of your are clicking away furiously right now on your mmb because it is kind of fun and something that you don’t do all of the time, right.  By the way, if you do it 5 times in a row, then left mouse button click 2 times, then right mouse button click 4 times, then back to the mmb for 3 more times you will get a special treat on my site.  Alright, back to the point.  So here is what you have to do to get this feature to work.

1.)  Open up a part or an assembly (obvious, right?)

2.)  Middle mouse button CLICK on a vertex, a face, or an edge (notice how the face turn’s magenta instead of blue).  Now your icon will turn into the rotate icon but it will also include an axis through the middle of the icon.

3.)  Hold down the mmb and rotate away

Nifty, huh?  If you want to see kind of a not so good video (still working on my video creation skills) of this you can check it out below or here.

Some other better known middle mouse button features are:

1. Hold down Alt and the mmb and you can roll the view
2. Hold down Ctrl and the mmb and you can pan around your screen
3. Hold down Shift and the mmb and you can zoom in and out

So there you have it.  Maybe a little hidden functionality that you were not aware of.

Still looking for that special treat on my site by doing the clicking song and dance?  Alright, I may have misled you a little bit but I will give you this to enjoy.  Check out this video and fast forward to the 75:00 minute mark.  Now that is funny!