Copy Settings Wizard

Copy Settings Wizard

Alright, it’s 8am Monday morning and you made it to the office. Traffic was a nightmare, because apparently, it’s important to stop and look at the fender bender in the opposite lanes of travel even though there’s a median, regardless you’re in the office. You fire up your machine when your buddy in IT strolls by. He informs you, just how much you owe him for coming in over the weekend and upgrading all the machines to the latest and greatest version of SOLIDWORKS. Just as he’s finishing his riveting story of the 15-machine wide weekend update, SOLIDWORKS loads up and you see all your awesome shortcuts and custom settings are GONE!!! QUICK EVERYBODY PANIC!

IT had all the best intentions of setting you up for success by loading a new version of SOLIDWORKS on your machine, but what they failed to take into consideration is how much customization work you did. You customized the RMB menus, short-cut bars, keyboard, mouse gestures, and the Command Manager. This customization is what made YOU fast in SOLIDWORKS. You laid out the interface in a way that makes sense to YOU and YOUR workflow. Now all that work is gone. You’ll have to do it all over again. Well maybe….

If you’re reading this looking for fix for the exact scenario above, I apologize, there really isn’t anything I can do. But if you’re lucky enough to read this RIGHT BEFORE you do any updates or right before you need to do a re-installation of SOLIDWORKS, then you’re in luck. If you customize SOLIDWORKS or maybe see a customized version of SOLIDWORKS from a colleague that you like, you can save your settings with the COPY SETTINGS WIZARD.

To access the tool you can go to Start > SOLIDWORKS Tools [YEAR] > Copy Settings Wizard [YEAR].  And from there you can select “Save Settings” and “Next”.

Now you have the option to select the location and name of the file by selecting the “Browse” button.  Then you can select which aspects of your settings you want to save and Select Finish.

Now any time you want to reload your settings you can choose “Restore Settings” from the Copy Settings Wizard.

Just as a word of caution, be sure to note that the “System Options” checkbox on save settings file also includes file locations from your system options.  So if your settings are using local directories when they should be using network directories or you decide to share your settings file, the save settings file will reflect those local directories.  If you want to alleviate that concern, just uncheck that box.

Well there you have it.  Everything all set so you can save your settings without fear of losing them due to an upgrade or re-installation.

Brandon Nelms
Application Engineer
Computer Aided Technology, Inc