All new users I work with invariably ask me a question followed by a request. Is there a list of all the keyboard shortcuts? Yes; go to Work Environments, Shortcut Schemes, Keyboard Shortcuts, click Show Shortcut List in Browser. Once they see the seven pages of keyboard shortcuts, the following request is made: You should make a list of the most important shortcuts. Three years later… done. Some of these
I’ve been a bassist for over 20 years (over two-thirds of my life). As college approached and I was deciding what to do with my life, I had two options: professional musician or architect. Much of my life could be described as a balancing act between musician and architect. The tipping point from one to the other happened during my junior year of college, though I didn’t notice it for
The split command (cmd + opt + I is my keyboard shortcut, the button looks like a little red axe) works for walls, slabs, meshes, roofs, beams, fills, lines, polylines, splines, arcs/circles, and zones. Why did I just learn this today? I thought it was just for 2D objects. Good to know.
I keep the majority of my operators on a hidden layer called Operators. However it’s a pain to turn on the layer when I need it on. In times past I’d either go to the layers, select operator, turn it on, or I’d go to an “all on” layer combination, or a special layer combination that was a “3D + operators,” or I’d select a slab, change it to the
I’ve set the keyboard shortcut for the Quick Layers palette to ‘control + X’. The filtering capabilities of this little palette are huge and easy to use. I am always isolating layers to do quick moves. When working on a complex model (or drawing), very often the answer is to turn off layers, make the changes, and turn layers back on. The Show/Hide toggle is great for sifting through what
We all have bad habits in ArchiCAD. Some of this is from how we were taught and some from the version we learned on. As the program evolves, we need to reevaluate how we work. Do we still need to hold down shift? Is it time to get used to the tracker? Are we still hanging on to old key commands from v8.1? Some are worth keeping. I want to
Whether you’re using the the coordinate box or the tracker, there are a lot of ways to write a number. Some are easier than others. A quick rule of thumb is that ArchiCAD recognizes fractions as inches, whole numbers and decimals as feet. So… a couple of ways to input three and a half inches: .2916667′ .2916667 0-3.5″ 0-3.5 3.5″ 3 1/2″ 3 1/2 3.5/1 3.5/ 7/2″ 7/2
Take a few minutes and check out the techniques mentioned on this post as well as this one on the ArchiCAD-Talk forum. I highly recommend setting up a keyboard shortcut for the command mentioned in the second post. I have set mine to ‘[‘. It’s fast, easy, and I can’t believe I lived without it all these years. I’ll talk more about my tangential comments within that second thread next week.
