Advance Steel – Streamline Your Palettes

To produce our drawings and BOMs in Advance Steel we generally use three palettes: Drawing Styles, Drawing Processes and BOM Templates. When you open these palettes you are presented with a plethora of options, so which ones should you use when? After the first few projects you probably settle into a rhythm of using a handful of these options and never touching the others. Did you know you can adjust the system to only show your desired options on the palettes and remove all the others?

To adjust the drawing styles palette, go into Output > Document Manager > Drawing Style Manager. On the left you will have a folder structure, in which the top two folders are Advance and User. Expand them and you will see folders corresponding to the pages on the Drawing Styles palette. Select each folder in turn and the main pane will show a list of the styles in that category. You can tick or untick each style as you wish, and only the ticked styles will appear on the palette in future. You can repeat this for each folder under Advance and User.

For the drawing processes palette, you do the same thing but you start with Output > Document Manager > Drawing Process Manager. On the left expand Advance or User and then Drawing Processes. Then you can select the folder you require and tick the processes you want in your palette. Click OK when you are done.

Finally, we have the BOM templates palette. For this one you go to Output Document Manager > BOM Editor, and instead of a dialog box this opens up a whole new interface. At the top right expand Advance / User templates, then BOM or Derived Documents, then select your folder and tick your favourites and say OK.

Once you have set your preferences in each location you should make sure that all three palettes are properly closed (not just minimised to the title bar) and restart Advance Steel. From now on the palettes will only show the items you ticked in the boxes.