Accessing and customizing the Ribbon

The Ribbon bar was introduced to SolidWorks several versions back. It allows the user to have much more screen real estate versus having all the required toolbars turned on. It's configurable and dockable. As I covered in the last movie, we can click on the various tabs below the Ribbon to change what icons are available to us. By default, we have these four here. We can add or remove different tool tabs to the Ribbon. Click on Weldments, it adds a new tab, so then if I click on Mold Tools, for instance, it's going to add it there. That Ribbon bar we can move around the screen if we need to.

By clicking anywhere up here, I can drag it out. Notice I drag it out, I could just place it in the Desktop if I want, I can place it on another window if I wanted to or I can dock it. So I can dock it back to the original location at the top. I can come over here and I can dock it to the right or dock it to the left, your choice. If you do that, it just places it there. You've got the same available tabs. Drag that back out. I prefer to have it on the top and it docks. We have a lot of other tool tabs that we can bring out as well, or toolbars.

I can right-click here, anywhere in that gray area and it will bring up these available toolbars. So one that I happen to like and use a lot is, if you go down here to the Tools tab, it's going to pop out that little toolbar. Now sometimes it will drop it here in the middle of the screen, sometimes it will dock somewhere. So just kind of look around your screen to maybe where that originally got dropped. Now I can drag it and dock it over here. I like to put it on the right hand side. It gives me a little more real estate, and then I have those tools available and that always stays there. I can also go ahead and add Tools to any one of these Ribbon bars to customize it to my liking.

So if I click on, for instance, the Sketch tab, if I right-click on it, at the very bottom, I can say Customize, the CommandManager, and the first screen that comes up is the Toolbar tab and notice that's exactly what we had before. So if I want to add or remove toolbars, I can do that here as well. Under the Commands, we have all the commands that are available in any one of these sketch tabs. So, like for instance, if I go to Sketch, these are all the sketch tools that are available. Only a subset of those is available in the actual ribbon. So if I'd like to add something to that, I can just drag it over.

So, one that I like to use a lot is called Sketch Picture. I'm just going to click on that and drag it. Wherever I drag, it's going to drop a little icon on the screen for us to use to quickly get to it. You can add as many as you want, and the same thing is you can click on one of those and remove it. So I don't want it. So I'm going to drop it back there and I can, same thing, reorganize my icons as needed. Click on that and we're good to go. The Ribbon bar is a very helpful interface for getting tools quickly and with less clutter on the Desktop. It can be modified with your favorite tools and dock to one of three locations to suit your layout needs.