From the course: Learning Altium

User interface - Altium Designer Tutorial

From the course: Learning Altium

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User interface

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- [Instructor] Once we have opened the Altium Designer software for the very first time, we will see the general user interface. Now, it may look familiar as it is a Windows-based software and will have a similar look and feel to many other Windows-based softwares. So, for example, I have tabs, I have some drop down menus, side panels, and so on, similar to, say, Word or Excel. Now, the largest portion of my interface would be my workspace, or what we call the main design window in the middle here. And here is where I can zoom in or out or pan around my schematics as needed. And at the top of my interface, I have what is called the Active Bar, which holds most commonly used tools and commands. And we will be learning many of these tools and what they do throughout this course. Now, perhaps the most important drop down, when it comes to the user interface, is the View tab. Here I have the ability to turn on or off a number of Panels and Toolbars just by clicking on those specific options. So, for example, Libraries, I can click to show my libraries on my right-hand side panel here. And, similar, I can turn each of these panels on or off to suit my specific needs. Now, the Libraries panel is just a list of all library components and symbols available within our design project. And these libraries can be custom built or pulled from the existing Altium vaults. One thing to also note is that our interface is quite customizable, so I can simply just click and drag any panel to change its location. So I could click and drag my Libraries panel here, just to make it a floating panel, or I could dock it to, say, my left-hand side, and now I'm seeing the Libraries panel on my left-hand side. So it's completely customizable to suit your own specific needs. And for the purpose of this course, I will mostly be working with the default user interface with just having the Projects side panel on the left-hand side. And this side panel, very useful, again, just shows all the documents that we're working with within a project. And then having the Libraries side panel on the right-hand side. Most of the other panels will be turned off in my case, but it is important to note that this is completely customizable to suit each individual user's needs.

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