Datasheet

19
Chapter 1: Meeting Google SketchUp
If your modeling window is too narrow to show all the tools on the
Getting Started toolbar, you can click the arrow on the right to see the
rest of them.
✓ Dialog boxes: Some programs call them palettes and some call them
inspectors; SketchUp doesn’t call them anything. Its documentation
(the SketchUp Help document you can get to in the Help menu) refers to
some of them as managers and some as dialog boxes, but I thought I’d
keep things simple and just call them all the same thing: dialog boxes.
✓ Status bar: You can consider this your SketchUp dashboard, I suppose.
The status bar contains contextual information you use while you model.
✓ Context menus: Right-clicking things in your modeling window usually
causes a context menu of commands and options to open. These are
always relevant to whatever you happen to right-click (and whatever you’re
doing at the time), so the contents of each context menu are different.
Although the following items aren’t part of the SketchUp user interface (like all
the stuff in the preceding list), they’re a critical part of modeling in SketchUp:
✓ A mouse with a scroll wheel: You usually find a left button (the one you
use all the time), a right button (the one that opens the context menus),
and a center scroll wheel that you both roll back and forth and click
down like a button. You should get one if you don’t already have one —
it’ll improve your SketchUp experience more than any single other thing
you can buy.
✓ A keyboard: This sounds silly, but some people have tried to use
SketchUp without one; it’s just not possible. So many of the things you
need to do all the time (such as make copies) involve your keyboard, so
you’d better have one handy if you plan to use SketchUp.
Hanging out at the menu bar
SketchUp’s menus are a pretty straightforward affair; you won’t find anything
surprising like “Launch Rocket” in any of them, unfortunately. All the same,
here are the menus:
✓ File: Includes options for creating, opening, and saving SketchUp files.
The File menu is also where to go if you want to import or export a file,
or make a printout of your model view.
✓ Edit: Has all the commands that affect the bits of your model that are
selected.
✓ View: This one’s a little tricky. You’d think it’d contain all the options
for flying around in 3D space, but it doesn’t — that stuff’s on the Camera
menu. Instead, the View menu includes all the controls you use to affect
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