Very fast and efficient with zero mouse movement.

One other cool feature is the ability to assign your own acronym for any command in the system. Use Tools-Customize-Keyboard and fill in any single or multi-letter acronym you’d like in the “Search Shortcut” column. For example, for the “Sheet Metal-Edge Flange” command, you could use the “EF” characters. Now if you hit “S” and then “EF” followed by return, it will run that command because any command with an assigned shortcut will be listed first in the search results when you type the associated acronym! This is essentially a way to create multi-letter shortcuts for keyboard driven command execution.

Enjoy,
John Sweeney
SolidWorks Corporation

Thanks for the response! I did notice the functionality you mentioned. However, I feel that some users might type in the 1st few letters and then click it with the tool with their mouse.

Otherwise they can arrow key down and hit enter. I just feel that it might be better if there was a way to get the Search Bar to pop up by your shortcut bar if you would want it set that way.

Please don’t get me wrong. I think this is an AWESOME enhancement. Just maybe a possible enhancement for a future release (if it is even possible).

Thanks again!

You write, “The one future enhancement I would really like to see however is a way to get this option closer to the Shortcut Bar when you activate it. This would require a lot let mouse movement in order to use it.”

But check it out — there’s no need for ANY mouse movement. Activate the Shortcut Bar as normal, and then just start typing away. Your typing input should be going to the Command Search field automagically.

Another thing you can do is set your own keyboard shortcut to activate Command Search. You can do this from the Tools > Customize dialog, on the Keyboard tab. Look for Search Commands in the Search category.

-John

Thanks for the additional information. Very cool!

I’d like to see an extensive blog post done on how to use the new Equation Editor. The old one always breaks my balls when I needed to use it, probably because I don’t use it enough.

Be nice if they removed the OLE crap. In my not very humble opinion, OLE never lived up to Microsoft’s hype. I’m always clicking outside of the Excel spreadsheet and losing it. Yes, I know I can open the Excel spreadsheet in a separate Window. That’s got drawbacks as well.

Jon Banquer
San Diego, CA
http://cadcamtechnologyleaders.blogspot.com/

Also, my favorite two items that are a bit more subtle… We have done these two changes in an effort to “respect” where you place your documents:
1. If your SW application window spans (or partially spans) two monitors, then dragging a file from Explorer into your SW session will open that document on the monitor where you drop the file.
2. The Window-Cascade and Window-Tile menu commands have been updated to also respect the current locations of your files. If you have three documents randomly positioned on monitor 1 and a single document positiioned on monitor 2, then selecting one of the Window-Tile or Cascade commands will perform the action as if you had two SW sessions open. In the example above, the three documents on monitor 1 would be cascaded or tiled on monitor #1 and the single document which was positioned primarily on monitor #2 would be maximixed (as big as possible) on monitor #2.

I’m glad to hear that you guys like these improvements…

Best Regards,
John Sweeney
SolidWorks