SOLIDWORKS Toolbars to Boost Your Productivity

SOLIDWORKS Toolbars make navigating the interface easier and can bring features and functions that are typically truncated directly to your mouse. Several toolbars can help save more than a few clicks too, since they can mitigate a lot of frustration that newer users may experience.

SOLIDWORKS Toolbars

Here are some toolbars that can help you out, whether you’re just getting started with SOLIDWORKS or are a power user at your company:

2D to 3D Toolbar

If you’ve recently switched from 2D CAD software to the world of 3D, this toolbar can help ease that transition. It allows you to better leverage your existing DWG/DXF drawings so that once they’re imported into the same sketch, they can be quickly moved to the proper sketch plane, have the geometry aligned, and then converted to an extrusion to bring it into 3D. It also has tools like repair sketch in case there are small gaps in the file you’ve imported. Using this SOLIDWORKS toolbar can greatly speed up the creation of 3D files from your legacy data.

The 2D to 3D Toolbar

Align Toolbar

The Align toolbar helps clean up and improve the legibility of drawings. The functions here allow for staggering, grouping, alignment, and rearranging of selected dimensions within the drawing environment. Rather than having to manually rearrange dimensions to get the proper spacing, just box-select the dimensions and use the auto-arrange feature to get there in one click. The align tools can then further assist in the arrangement of annotations within the drawing.

The Align Toolbar

Quick Snap Toolbar

If you are new to the concept of relations in sketches or just want to speed up the way that you add them, quick snaps make your first or next selection of a sketch entity adhere to certain guidelines. This could mean snapping to midpoints, remaining parallel or perpendicular to a selected entity, or snapping to a specified length or angle. Automatically add relations as you work, reducing the time it takes to fully define sketches.

The Quick Snap Toolbar

Selection Filters Toolbar

Selection filters are one of the most common toolbars for users to have available to them, as they can simplify the process of making selections and help communicate to SOLIDWORKS what items in a sketch or feature you’re really trying to reference. For even quicker application of a filter to common entities, there are even a few default keyboard shortcuts. Select x for faces, v for vertices, and e for edges.

The Selection Filter Toolbar

Lifecycle and Collaboration Toolbar

The lifecycle and collaboration toolbar for those connected to 3DEXPERIENCE allows for one-click locks, unlocks, saves, and shares to either your Swym community or to 3D Drive thanks to the new Share and Markup capabilities in SOLIDWORKS. Once you select the share and markup button, you can generate a shareable link that can be shared with anyone or email collaborators you’d like to restrict access to. All of this is now available with any new license of SOLIDWORKS purchased.

The Lifecycle and Collaboration Toolbar

If you have access and want to learn how to activate, or just want to learn more, check out our starter guide.