Best Practices Course – Week 14 Part 4 – © copyright 2012 by Eric Bobrow

BEST PRACTICES COURSE – WEEK 14 – Navigation and Drafting Power Tips

PART 4 – Navigation Shortcuts and Speed Tricks

Hello, this is Eric Bobrow.  And in this lesson, we’ll take a look at some navigation shortcuts and speed tricks.  I’ll go over methods you can use to jump quickly to specific parts of the project, how to effectively use the navigation area in the bottom left of each window, and how to manage windows and your screen or screens in the most effective ways.  [0:00:23]

So here I have a sample project.  Now if you want to go to a different story, you know that you can be in the Project Map. And I can double click on a story and jump there.  Now often when I go to a story and use the Project Map, I might have the wrong layer combination or other settings.  You can see here this little piece of roof or a fill showing looks odd. Because actually – and I will go back to the View Map – when I’m on this story, I want to have a different layer combination.  So down on the first floor, the ground floor, you can see it says Con Doc Floor Plan is the properties. And when I double click here on the second floor it’s got a different layer combination that shows some of the roofs.  [0:01:02]

So obviously we want to spend more time in the View Map once we’ve got that set up properly to go from story to story.  But there are times, for example, when we’re in a particular type of view, let’s say Lighting and Reflected Ceiling Plan, where it is expected to jump from story to story. But instead of moving back to the Project Map, I might just go to the toolbar and say go to a different story this way.  So I can just use the little popup here.  Or I can say go up a story or down a story, and there’s some keyboard shortcuts.  [0:01:35]

Now the keyboard shortcuts that are listed here are a little bit hard for me to remember and I’m sure for others. I use ones that are built in that aren’t listed, and I think they are well worth knowing.  And that is holding down the Command or CTRL key and holding the up or down arrow of your cursor keys.  So I’ll hold down Command+down, and down, or Command+up and up, and you can see how it cycles through those stories.  And if you have a multiple story building, 5 or 10 or more stories, this can be a real time saver.  [0:02:05]

Now let me go back to the ground floor plan here, and let’s talk about zooming.  When we roll the mouse wheel in, we zoom in and of course zoom out.  Now what not everyone realizes that that if I’m pointing my mouse for example in this upper corner of the building for the utility room, and I roll in, that it keeps that point on screen fixed and it zooms in around it. Likewise when I zoom out. So if I wanted to zoom in on the kitchen, I could position my mouse over there and then roll the mouse in. Or of course roll it out.  [0:02:41]

Now for panning of course, pressing down the center mouse button will give me the hand. And I can move around.  It’s going to be simpler to do that than using the Pan tool where you have to click on the hand, click to start the movement, click again to finish it.  So that’s three clicks as opposed to press, move, and release.  Now one of the issues that comes up on the Mac side is that there’s this wonderful Magic Mouse that apple sells, that I’m using myself, and it doesn’t have any buttons.  Now it is sensitive to left and right sides, sort of built in, but the center mouse click is not available by default.  [0:03:23]

But you can use a system preference under the Apple menu, System Preferences.  You can install, and it’s a free tool, I’ll go to the “Magic Prefs”. So it’s called the Magic Mouse and Magic Prefs is one that you can find on the Internet, it’s a free tool that you can download.  And it does allow you to add some additional shortcuts. For example, this one that I’m highlighting or hovering over, says, “One finger middle access click”, it’s set right now to match the middle click.  And you can see that it’s going to, if I Press down anywhere in this general area it will act like I’m clicking a traditional mouse.  So without that, if I have that turned off, then it won’t be able to pan in ArchiCAD. But if I use this, then I can use this Magic Mouse.  So keep that in mind if you are using the Magic Mouse and you thought that you didn’t have a center mouse button. You can do all sorts of other customization here as well.  [0:04:20]

Now when I roll the mouse, I’m zooming in or out. But if I hold down the Alt or Option key, then it will move me up or down.  So I’m rolling the mouse and I can pan up or down.  If you have a Magic Mouse or similar, you can go left to right.  So I’m holding down the Option key and moving left to right on that Magic Mouse surface.  And it’s panning for me.  So you might find that useful.  Now other shortcut here is Fit in Window, which of course we can click on this to get to it.  And let me just zoom in on an area like this. And then how would I get back to it? Well of course I can go here, but not a lot of people realize that you can double click the center mouse button and it will jump out to Fit in Window.  So the center mouse button that I use by pressing to get the pan tool, double clicking, will make it Fit in Window.  [0:05:18]

Now this has worked on Windows for a long time.  On the Mac side, ArchiCAD didn’t actually respond to the double mouse wheel click until recently.  Maybe it’s ArchiCAD 15 or maybe 14 is when started to do that.  But I find that convenient and just a little bit faster than going down to the Fit in Window.  Now in the Navigation area here, we have our Scale Settings.  So for example, the 1/4 inch to a foot or 1:50 would be the closest metric equivalent.  And of course I change this on the fly to anything I like, and it’s recorded in the View Map so that we are able to get to a particular scale.  [0:05:57]

Now the scale relates to how the building will print out on paper or how you’re setting it up for that printout.  And ArchiCAD then determines the size of the paper elements such as text size or the marker bubbles in relationship to that.  Now if you want to decide or make an assessment whether certain text is going to be legible, you can click on the percent next to the scale and that will take you to 100%, which will then simulate at least as best ArchiCAD can make a guess at, how big it will be on paper.  So we can see that, for example, the dimension text is small, but just readable. And of course the room names are bigger.  [0:06:43]

Now I can also use the popup next in this zoom and jump to something like 200% or 500%, things like that.  So these can be saved views, or let’s say presets that I can use. And when I do bring them up larger it does allow me to see perhaps the walls have a certain thickness, a weight, but the objects and the door and the door swing is much thinner in terms of the line weight.  Of course seeing that onscreen requires that one has the Onscreen View Options set to True Line Weight, because when I turn that off, we’re going to see everything in hairline, regardless of what scale or how we are zoomed in.  [0:07:24]

I’ll go back to the 100% scale here.  Now we can use these presets in another way.  And you will see some named ones listed.  Not everyone knows that that’s available.  Let me just zoom in on the kitchen here and press down on the little popup, and say Save Current Zoom. And I’ll call it “Kitchen”.  Now I have a choice, is this a view that is relevant across all stories? Well this would make sense if it was maybe a staircase or the building footprint or the west wing of the building or something like that.  But of course, the kitchen is likely to be only on a single story so I will only have this zoom show up on that particular story.  [0:08:08]

Now if I go back to Fit in Window, you will see that I can choose this kitchen, zoom, and it jumps me right to it.  So you might have a variety of these one perhaps to jump out to the property lines. Another one to show just the building. Another one to show particular rooms.  It’s just a quicker way to navigate.  Now if you decide that you don’t need that view, you can go here and say “Delete it” or “Rename it” if you want to give it a different name here. And it will ask if you want to do that.  Now there is a little bug in terms of ArchiCAD.  I would have to call it a bug, it’s a limitation, but it’s a rather odd one.  And that is let me just go ahead and save this zoom again, and I’ll just call it “kitchen 2” just to show that it’s a new view.  [0:08:54]

Now at this point, I can delete it, but what happens if I change the size of this window? So this window now is a smaller window.  You’ll notice that the – actually let me go back to the floor plan here – that this little popup no longer has the delete.  If I bring up the Kitchen 2 view, it does zoom in properly. But the delete and rename are no longer available.  And this was something that was mysterious to me and to others for quite awhile until I found out that if the window size was different, it would not show this option.  I’m going to go back to the previous window size here, tell it to go to the kitchen view, and now you’ll see Delete or Rename – let me just rename it to “Kitchen” here. So just know that if your window size has changed, that Delete or Rename will not be available.  [0:09:56]

Now there is another way that you can save a zoomed position that you can go back to easily, and that is using the View Map.  So for example, I can go and save the current view and give it a name. Let’s say normally it might say by Project Map here, and I might change it to custom.  And let’s say that we wanted it to be the Kitchen Enlarged Plan here.  Now when I do save it, if records the current zoom of I allow it to be there.  Now the ignore zoom when opening this view is routinely checked, but we are going to turn this off in this case because we want to be able to jump. We want ArchiCAD to jump us to this particular location, so I will create this view.  [0:10:43]

So now let me just Fit in Window here and I’ll just double click on Kitchen Enlarged Plan. You can see how it jumps to that view.  It also has the side effect. If I go to a sheet, for example, one that I know has some space for putting in a drawing, then I can drag this Kitchen Enlarged Plan on here. And when I do that, it will bring in a cropped view. And you can see that it was cropped to show just what was on that particular drawing.  Now I can go in and change the cropping. I can go and perhaps adjust the boundaries here.  I can go use the option to resize it in both directions as I wish. Just get it fine tuned to wherever I think it’s going to be best suit my needs perhaps as well as possible.  [0:11:28]

So that’s the other benefit here is that it will record a cropping that is used as the starting point for when you place the drawing on the sheet.  Now I’ve created the name Kitchen Enlarged Plan because I wanted to have it at a different scale.  So let’s just go and just quickly and change that.  If I double click on this here, perhaps I’ll change the settings of this, and make it instead of 1/4 inch, make it 1/2 inch, so it will be twice as big, say 1:24 or 1:20 or something like that in metric.  And maybe I’m going to change the layer combination from the floor plan to; I have a special layer combination for an enlarged plan, where I add additional notes of certain types.  And I say OK. [0:12:10]

And you can see now it’s showing some different information.  Now if I go back to that sheet here, we’re going to see, and I select this and tell it to update, we’re going to see that it changes in terms of the cropping, and we might have to manually go and find out that cropping here or reposition the information in there.  Now if you change the definition of a view, you may actually want to – in some cases it may be easier just to delete that and just drag it on again.  Because now if I grab this kitchen enlarged plan here, it’s going to be much bigger.  You can see how that’s changed.  So sometimes it’s a little bit better just when you do change a view in terms of its scale to just delete it and place it again with the new scale, because it will remember the cropping, or use the cropping more easily.  [0:13:04]

Now when we are working normally here on – let’s say that we’re going back to the floor plan to that Kitchen Enlarged Plan view – let’s say that I wanted to compare the floor plan to the lighting plan.  If I double click here, you will see that I’m staying in the same location and showing that lighting plan. And if I go to the Systems plan, we can see it’s showing different information or the structural plan. It’s still remaining in the same location in space.  The reason why these work this way – and in fact they will work regardless of the view – for example, if I zoom out to show the whole building and then I change these views, they are not jumping me to a new position. Why?  [0:13:50]

Because this view, when I open up its settings, has “Ignore zoom when opening this view”.  So generally I like using this Ignore Zoom option, because it allows me to be in any part of the building and just switch from one style, like the lighting plan, to another style, like the structural plan or the floor plan, without it jumping out to show the whole building; delaying me while I have to go back and zoom in.  So ignore zoom is very useful most of the time.  But of course in some cases like these Kitchen Enlarged Plan, we may want to have that zoom recorded.  [0:14:27]

Now if I don’t want that Kitchen Enlarged Plan in the project, I might just delete this view here. And it tells me that I can’t undo that.  Let me go ahead and just delete it anyway, and go back to the First Floor Plan view.  But notice that if I go to the Layout Book and we see this drawing, this drawing still exists.  It still exists on the layout book. But if I right click on it, you’ll see that it no longer says Open Source View, it gives me the option to link the drawing to the view. So this is now an orphaned view.  It actually will remain on the sheet and can be printed as a record copy of whatever was placed there.  But it will not update, and you can’t say, “Open the source view”, because the source view has been deleted.  [0:15:19]

Of course in this case, what I might want to do is simply delete that view from the project.  And I’ll just go back to the floor plan again.  Now when we are using the plus magnifier, let me just go back out.  Of course we can zoom in on an area by drawing a boundary on it.  We can also double click on the plus, not everybody knows that. Double click on the plus, it will keep the center of the view the same.  If I double click on the minus, it will keep the center the same, but go out. So you can just double click on these things.  Now when we zoom in, of course it’s very easy to see that I’m describing an area that I want to fill the screen.  But when I zoom out, did you know that you can also say this utility area that I’m looking at, I would like to end up in the upper right area. [0:16:15]

So if I use the minus sign here with the magnifier, I can describe a box in and then what’s currently on the screen will jump into that box.  So what was filling the screen becomes part of that in the area that I described.  Now let’s say that we had part of the building on an angle. So I’m going to go draw with the Wall tool. And let’s create a rotated area. And this is going to be rather arbitrary here.  In ArchiCAD 13, the option was introduced to rotate the orientation.  So I can actually click on this, click on a point, click on another point here, and then say I would like to rotate this.  So this is a very nice option if you want to work on the building or part of a building in parallel to the sides and top and bottom of the screen.  [0:17:10]

It will also automatically change the way that X and Y is interpreted to match the orientation.  Now you don’t have to do it on an angle, in other words, it doesn’t have to be on an angle.  Let me go back to the previous view here, and you can see how the previous view sort of jumps me back and even rotates it. Perhaps I take this rotation here and I may take the right side of the building along, and may want to use the Shift key if there’s a different snaps to make sure that you’re clicking on points that are currently on the straight angle, and then use the guidelines and make sure that I’m getting a nice even angle, 90° in this case.  [0:17:50]

Sin now I’ve rotated the entire building, perhaps it’s going to be more convenient to think about just like you turn a piece of paper.  Now you’ll notice that I could use the previous zoom, but I can also just click on Reset Orientation.  And you can see how that jumps it back.  The angle is specified or shown at any given time.  Now this previous zoom and next zoom are pretty interesting.  Not everyone takes full advantage of them.  Let’s say that I was working in two areas of the project.  Let’s say this utility area, and let me just zoom out, and let’s say that there was another area where I was needing to verify some things or draw some things and go back and forth.  [0:18:31]

Well I’m now looking at one corner. I can go previous view, previous view, and you can see how that jumps from the view that I was in in a sequence, and I can go next view, next view. So this can be a very quick way to jump around to two parts of the project typically.  So I think that you’ll find that can be a very useful way to take advantage of previous and next zooms.  Now another way that we can navigate around the project that not everyone knows is available is the Preview for Navigator.  So you’ll see in the bottom left of the Navigation area, Navigator Preview. When I click on that, you’ll see that it brings up this window.  This window can be moved around or it can be docked. [0:19:17]

If I make enough space for it, I guess I can snap it into position. And on windows it would sort of create its own space when it docks.  And you can see how it’s grabbed these. Oh, by the way, if you want to move this without affecting the other ones, you can hold down the Command, CTRL on Windows, and this will allow you to move a palette that was otherwise attached without affecting the other ones. I will hold down, in this case, the Command key when I start to move it.  Now this preview window I can make bigger, I can just grab it and make it bigger here.  And one thing, if I zoom in on something, you’ll see how this preview is showing.  I can actually move this around and it will be like a little bird’s eye view. [0:20:08]

So if you haven’t worked with this, if you have a large project, this can be a real time saver.  You can control the zoom fairly tightly in here as well as just move it to a whole different part of the project.  Now this Navigator Preview is simplified.  You can see some sort of funny little boxes. Each one of these little boxes in this case is either a dimension chain or a section marker, things like that.  And it’s not trying to show the whole thing, it’s just showing generally where it’s located.  So it’s enough to be able to tell what going on. So you can see what room you’re in, etc. [0:20:46]

Now sometimes this Navigator Preview is a little bit hard to work with, let me just demonstrate.  Let’s go and turn on our Site Plan layer combination.  Let’s see, here is the site plan. And you can see that the view has zoomed out here – actually we are seeing more information. We are seeing the property lines.  Now if I redraw the preview here, you can see that now the preview is showing a similar set of information.  So the preview is based on whatever we would see if we were to zoom all the way out. [0:21:33]

Now this means that it can be a little bit hard to control it, because this, if I want to zoom in let’s say on a particular room or something like that, it’s gotten smaller here.  And so particularly with the Navigator Preview is a smaller area.  We don’t want to necessarily fill the screen.  This can get a little awkward.  So the thing to remember is that this is going to show the entire drawing, the floor plan or whatever window you’re in, given the current layers. And so if I go back to let’s say the floor plan where we are not seeing the property lines, let’s go back to this, and I zoom in Fit in Window, you can see that the building shows now a different amount of information, but the preview has not changed.  [0:22:26]

I need to go and redraw a preview, and now you can see it’s going to be easier to work with.  So what you may need to do at some point is to just change the layer combination, and then redraw the preview here in order to get that to show just the right level of detail.  And remember that you can make this bigger or smaller.  If you have a second screen, you can move this palette as well as other palettes off to the side, and you may find it useful to keep it open regularly.  Or just close and open it just when you need it just by clicking on this little button which you can use.  [0:23:03]

Now, right now we’re looking at the floor plan. Let’s say that I was working on the floor plan here.  So here’s the floor plan layout sheet and perhaps I look at some other views like the Reflected Ceiling Plan and things like that.  If I go back to the floor plan here, how would I get back to that layout sheet?  Well of course I can open up the Layout Book here and go find it, but it might actually be a long list, and I may not quite remember or it’s just tedious to have to go find it.  So one thing you can do is go under the Window menu, and you will see here that there is the “A-09 Reflected Ceiling Electrical Plan”.  So it’s showing under the Window menu, I can jump to that layout. [0:23:55]

So under the Window menu, we have for example I was looking at the east elevation here recently.  Now when I bring it up from the Window menu, it may or may not have the right layers, so that is a limitation there.  We can use our Quick Options in this case to the layers setup for – this is an elevation, so I will take the elevation. So you may find that using the Window menu, you have to do two steps, but it can be a quick way to work with it.  [0:24:25]

Now let’s say that I opened up a section here, and I wanted to go back to that elevation.  When I go to the Window menu, you’ll see that the elevation is no longer there, because the section and elevation are sharing a window.  There’s a preference that you can use under the Options, Work Environment, that let’s see, if there’s Onscreen Options here, and this – let’s see. It’s More Options here, “When opening a view or layout from the menu or by double clicking, prefer to open in an existing window or prefer to open in a new window”.  So you could change this, and every time you opened a new section or elevation or other type of view, it would create a new window and your list would get longer.  [0:25:16]

But I like generally leaving it at a minimum.  However you can force it when you want it to have them side by side.  For example, I want to have two sections and compare them.  I can right click on this section, and say instead of open, I can say open in new window.  And now I’m looking at that – and let me just bring this to fit my current screen resolution.  Now under the Window menu, you’ll see two sections are available.  Now that brings up the whole idea of window management.  Right now each one of these windows is taking up the full working space.  But I can resize it, for example, to have it take up less and zoom in on whatever an area I find of interest.  [0:26:04]

And this window I can also resize as well.  So these windows can be side by side or in whatever relationship you find useful here.  So that means I can click on one, click on the other and go back and forth.  Now in this case, they are similar layer combinations.  So it will work, but if you were doing the plan and section, you might find that the layer combinations have to be changed when you go back and forth.  But you may find it useful to have Windows displayed like this and then periodically go and just simply zoom them up to fit and use the whole space, and then later come back and zoom it back down. And so I can just click on this, make it fill the screen, work with it, and then click to make it just part of the screen.  [0:26:56]

So of course in Windows, the icons are a little different, but the same options for Restore and making it essentially fill the available space would be available.  Now if you have multiple monitors, then it really is very convenient to take advantage of that. You might have the floor plan on one window and the 3D on another, or you might have the 3D and two sections open on your secondary monitor.  I have a laptop, so my laptop screen has a certain resolution, and I have a bigger screen off to the side.  So I can put multiple windows off to the side and have perhaps just the plan window on the laptop.  You can arrange your palettes as well.  [0:27:38]

Now on the Mac, you can grab this toolbox and I can go take this off to the side. You can see how it’s disappearing from the screen I’m recording from here.  On windows, in order to do that you need to change ArchiCAD’s overall window to span the two or possibly more windows you’ve got.  So I can’t demonstrate that here, but basically you know you have the option to restore the ArchiCAD window as a whole to take up the entire screen or one entire screen, or you can restore it down to being perhaps part of a screen.  If you restore it down to be part of the screen, you can grab it and actually stretch that. Not only can you make it smaller, you can make it bigger and start to stretch it over to a second monitor.  And so you can end up with the ArchiCAD actual environment spanning two monitors that way.  [0:28:37]

And then you can move all of the windows in palettes wherever you like without any – otherwise ArchiCAD would prevent you from doing that, you wouldn’t see it as it disappeared off to the side.  So that can be very useful thing.  Now the final thing I will show you is that if I want to go back to the Layout Book, I can right click in empty space and there is the Go To menu.  And the Go To menu will show up as long as I’m not selecting something. And in which case if I select something then it would say drag or move or have some of those editing options.  But the Go To menu then allows me to say, for example, go to the last layout here.  So it just jumps to that. Or if I’m on the layout, I can right click and do the Go To menu, and go to the last section.  [0:29:28]

So this has a keyboard shortcut, F6. You set up keyboard shortcuts for all of these, last elevation or last worksheet to make it quicker to get to.  Or you can just use this right click.  Now we use a worksheet in MasterTemplate for the Interactive Legends. So these legends are the Kit of Parts that you can quickly zoom in and pick up wall types, and I can eyedrop different types of walls or different types of elements here.  The Interactive Legends, I don’t want to get into a full explanation of this, but it’s nice to have this in a separate window from whatever else I’m working, from the plan as well as other windows.  So we have it in a worksheet.  [0:30:19]

Now to be able to jump to that worksheet quickly, we can go in the View Map and say I want to just jump to the Interactive Legend worksheet. And now let me just jump back to let’s say the floor plan. So I can jump between this view and that one by scrolling.  But it’s nice to have a shortcut. So if you do want to put in shortcuts, it’s a little bit tricky because you have to go to the Options, Work Environment, Keyboard Shortcuts, and you have to know where to find that shortcut, because you won’t find it under the current menu structure.  [0:30:52]

The command that says “Go to the last elevation” won’t be there.  But if we switch this to say “All commands in alphabetical order”, you will see a list here. And I can scroll down and for example find last elevation or last worksheet.  It says that it’s in the Context menu. And so for example I can say last worksheet, let me do CTRL+W.  So I’m putting in a particular one that’s different than Command+W.  You can choose whatever you want.  Maybe it’s something else, but I’m going to click on a sign that now is going to be available. So I can just simply type that as a keyboard shortcut, and if I wanted to do the one for elevation, perhaps the CTRL+E.  [0:31:44]

Now this is different. If I tried Command+E, it says that that’s the Rotate command.  So I don’t want to do that. I’m doing CTRL+E. For windows maybe you do something like of Alt+CTRL+E or something like that.  So now it’s available, I say OK. And if I do CTRL+E, there you can see it came up with that last elevation.  Or if I do CTRL+W, it’s going to jump back to the Interactive Legends.  So this concludes our lesson on Navigation Shortcuts and Speech Tricks. I’ve gone over various approaches to jump quickly to specific parts of your project, effective use of the Navigation area in the bottom left of each window, and the options for working with multiple windows onscreen and possibly multiple screens that will speed up your work and your access to information within an ArchiCAD project.  This has been Eric Bobrow; please post your comments and questions on the page down below.  Thanks for watching.

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