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This TechWatch is based on the first section of my "I didn't know you could do that in Altium Designer 6" presentation at our user conference on the 31st October 2006. This section covers hints tips and tricks within the Altium Designer Environment, following sections will include the Schematic, PCB and Library environments.  

Each section is divided into parts, in part 1 I will cover the hints and tips shown for Workspace Manipulation under the Altium Designer Environment section.

The Altium Designer Environment

Within the Altium Designer Environment we looked at the areas of Workspace Manipulation and Data management.  Under Workspace Manipulation we looked at customising the user interface including tips with panels and custom toolbars.  With Data Management we explored the less known features of the Projects panel and the Storage Manager, this will be covered in Part 2 coming soon.

Workspace Manipulation

Moving Panels

When moving panels by clicking and dragging on the blue title bar you will see eye like buttons appear in the centre of the Altium Designer workspace.  These "eyes" are designed to help you with the positioning of panels around the workspace by automatically moving the panel to the edge of the workspace and docking or clipping them for you, matching the status of any existing panels on that edge.

To use these "eyes" simply drag your panel until your mouse cursor is hovering over one of the eye buttons in the direction you wish to place the panel. Don't forget you can use the pushpin icon   to change between docked and clipped.

Similar eyes will also appear when hovering one panel over another, either docked or floating, panel. These allow you to split a panel vertically or horizontally into a single panel called a fractal panel. Holding Shift and dragging on the blue title bar will allow you to break apart a fractal panel.

Using Holding Ctrl and Dragging on the blue title bar will allow move a panel without it trying to dock or clip to other panels or the edges of the workspace.  In addition to this if you right click on the Blue title bar you can select Allow Dock, which means you can set a panel to be allowed/not allowed to dock horizontally or vertically.

Full Screen Mode

You can instantly hide all you panels and title bar using the Full Screen mode. This can be found under View » Full Screen or by using the shortcut key Alt + F5.

Saving and Restoring Panels 

Once you have manipulated your panels and toolbars to your satisfaction you can save the layout to allow you to either migrate the settings to other computers or as a back up or even simply to switch between the layout preferences of different users sharing a workstation.

You can save you layouts using View » Desktop Layouts » Save/load layout.  You will also find the options of Default and Startup. Default will return the panel positions to their installation default positions and Startup will return them to the positions from the last time Altium Designer was started up.

Desktop Preferences

The preferences for your desktop can be found under DXP » Preferences » View, here you will find options for panel popup speeds and animations plus grouping options for the documents bar.

You will also find here the option Restore open documents, if you find Altium Designer takes a long time to start up it is normally because it is opening all of the documents you left open when last shutting down.  If you want to temporarily stop Altium Designer restoring open documents you can hold down the Ctrl key whist starting the program.

Simple Toolbar Customisation

Toolbar customisation can normally be performed using the command DXP » Customise.  Information on how to use the customisation tools can be found under Help » Getting Started » Customising the Altium Designer Resources.

Some handy shortcuts and tips which can be used without having to open the customise dialog box.

• Use Alt + Click and Drag to move toolbar icons and commands
• Ctrl and Left Mouse Click will allow you to Edit a commands parameters, assigning a shortcut key to a command can be done here.
• Using the Libraries panel you can Lift Click Drag components out of the library list and drag them onto a toolbar, this will allow you to place this component using the toolbar. Could be used to create a toolbar of most commonly used resistor values for example.

Go forward to Part 2.