The user interface overview - Vectorworks Tutorial

- Understanding the user interface is key in mastering any software package. Let's take a look at the Vectorworks UI. In the fundamentals version of Vectorworks we have the basic tools available. And let's take a look at the top menu bar here. It's a standard menu bar that you'd find in other software where you have file, edit, and other specific sets of menus. And in the different versions of Vectorworks the menus are going to be a little bit different. Now let's take a look at the area just below that menu bar. We have an untitled one tab that we see here at the very top of that center window. And right next to it we have a zero one zero two table dot vwx. So if you click on that tab that actually brings up a whole other file. So right now we have two different files open. And in the center view window in that top tab it tells us what file we have open right now. So let's go right below that tab and take a look at our info bar. Now here we have a whole bunch of options and settings that we can select and make changes to depending on what we need done. And you notice if I hover over each one of these options it tells us what it is. And let's just click on this and it gives us a list of options that we can select. So we can select different layer planes different layers and we will cover that later in the course. Now right underneath that we have another part of this info bar but this information is specific to the selected tool. Right now we have a cursor selected and so we have different options. Then further to the right of that area here on that same bar we have other settings. Now we will get into those settings later on in the course. Now right underneath that with this ruler visible we have our view window. And essentially that is our view into the stuff we're building in Vectorworks. Right now we have a table. I'm going to hover over this box here that's a tabletop. So if we click on the top plan pull down menu in the info bar we can select the front view. And that front view will show up but at first Vectorworks shows us an info panel here. This is a little pop-up window and you'll see this through-out the program as well. We'll read through this real quick but essentially if we hit okay it's just telling us that there's a different setting that we could change to make changes in Vectorworks. It's giving us more information. Then we will just hit okay. And here we have our front view. So this is how we see our files. And the stuff that we have built in our Vectorworks work Now that we have seen our view window let's look to the left side of our screen. We have a Basic pallette this is at the upper left corner of the screen and it says Basic and this is a docked pallette. Meaning that it is a group of tools that are set to one location. And within this pallette we have a set of tools for creating things so we have rectangle tool the line tool the text tool and so on. Further down we have our tool sets it's similar to the basic pallette but we have different collections of tools. So if we scroll further down within that pallette and I hover over this icon. We have 3-D modeling and if you click on this you'll have tools that pertain to 3-D modeling. Now let's look at the icon next to that, it says visualization and these are dimensions or DIMS and notes, then we have walls, then we have detailing. So the tool sets provide a lot more tools just when we need them. Now let's go to the Attributes pallette. This is that floating pallette in the center here. I'm going to click the top bar and move it around so that you can tell that it's floating. And directly below that kind of piggy-backing off it is a Snapping pallette. I'm going to click the Snapping pallette and drag it off of that Attributes. So now I have torn it off of that. So depending on how you want this set up you can either leave it the way it is or you can dock these pallettes. SO I'll go ahead and do that. I'm going to click on the attributes pallette drag it over to the right side of the screen above object info and when I hover over top of object info or the object info pallette I have that blue highlight. I'll release that and now it is docked above the object info pallette. I'm going to go back and do the same thing with Snapping. So I will drag it to the upper right corner of the screen right above attributes. There it is. And now you can re-size this as you need all of these pallettes that are docked can be re-sized. One note on the Macintosh version of Vectorworks you can dock the Snapping pallette but on the PC you can't. So just be aware of that when you are using a PC. Alright so now we have the Snapping pallette the Attributes pallette and the Object info pallette all on the right side of the screen. So when we looked at our left side of the screen we had the Basic tools the different tools to create things and the way we have it set up now we have the different ways of changing options and editing our objects on the right side of the screen. So that's kind of a cool way of laying this out. Now the last thing we will take a look at is the Status bar at the bottom of the screen. So if you go here in the bottom left corner of the screen it has a bit of information. So that changes depending on what tools we have active or what we are doing in the scene. So that would be a good place for you to check to see what options you have available. On the bottom right side of the screen we have different bits of information that pertain to what you're doing specifically. So that's a brief overview of the User Interface. Go ahead and try it out and noodle around with different settings and see what works for you. As we go through the course we'll get more hands on practice with the interface. Next, let's see some navigation tools.