SolidWorks 2010 Bible

Chapter 2: Navigating the SolidWorks Interface

frequently use the Sketch toolbar. Likewise, for assemblies, you may want to display some addi-

tional toolbars and eliminate others. For this reason, when you change from a part document to a

drawing document, you may see your display adjust because the changing toolbars increase or

decrease the amount of space that is required.

Best Practice
It is best practice to set up the toolbars for each document type so that they take up the same amount of
space — for example, two rows on top and one column to the right. This way, changing between document
types is not so jarring, and the graphics area does not need to resize for each change. n

Moving toolbars

To move a toolbar, you can click with the cursor at the dotted bar on the left end of the toolbar, as

shown in Figure 2.14. The cursor changes to a four-way arrow and you can then drag the toolbar

where you want it. Toolbars dock either vertically or horizontally. You can resize undocked tool-

bars so that they have rows and columns. This arrangement is typically used with the Selection

Filter toolbar, which is often left undocked and compressed into a block that is three or four col-

umns wide.

FIGURE 2.14

Dotted bars enable you to move toolbars.

If the SolidWorks window is not wide enough for the toolbar to fit entirely in the screen, double

arrows like those shown in Figure 2.15 appear at the end of the truncated toolbar. When you click

the double arrows, a flyout toolbar appears with the missing icons, as shown in Figure 2.16.

FIGURE 2.15

A truncated toolbar showing double arrows

FIGURE 2.16

You can display all of a truncated toolbar by clicking the double arrows.