SketchUp Navigation and User Interface Tour, Part 2 – Toolbar and Workspace Tour

This post is the 2nd part of a series of SketchUp tutorials designed to get users acclimated to the SketchUp user interface. If you’d like to read part 1, you can access it here.

Now that we’ve gotten SketchUp open, let’s take a minute to get acclimated to the user interface. If you’ve never opened SketchUp before, your screen will look something like this –

The Menu Bar

Let’s just start at the top. At the top of the screen is your menu bar. This bar contains options like File, Edit, View, Camera, Etc. This menu bar allows you to access all of your model settings, as well as most of the tools that you can use in SketchUp as well.

The Toolbars

Below the menu bar are your toolbars. These are the icons that you can use to quickly access various tools in SketchUp. We’ll get into customizing toolbars at a later date, but just as a quick overview, these toolbars can be customized with your favorite tools. They can also be moved around on the page so you can set up your workspace in a way that’s intuitive to you.

The Drawing Area (or the workspace)

Below the toolbars is the drawing area, also known as the workspace. This is where you will actually create your 3D models. As you can tell, right now there is already a model of a woman. Her name is Sophie, and she is the default component that is included in every new model. Don’t worry if you don’t know what a component is – we’ll get into that later as well. She is included to give you a sense of scale (size), because she is approximately 5’6” tall.

One of the things you’ll notice about your model is that there are 3 different colored lines on the screen. These are your axes guides. These help you navigate the model by giving you a feel for what direction different objects are moving in SketchUp.

Status Bar

Down at the bottom of the screen you’ll see a grey bar. This bar is called the status bar, and it’s a very useful feature of SketchUp.

On the left side, this bar contains information on if your model is geo-located (if you’ve given it a real world location – more on this later), credit for who created the components in the model (if you’ve downloaded components from the 3d warehouse), and a link to the SketchUp instructor (helps you get started with SketchUp). By the way, this is a very helpful feature if you’re just getting started. If you click on the icon that looks like a little circle with a question mark in it, it will bring up the SketchUp instructor.

The SketchUp instructor contains some great tutorials for helping you get started in SketchUp. If you click on the links under “Advanced Operations”, they will take you to SketchUp’s online knowledge center, which is a very helpful website with lots of information about using SketchUp.

Let’s go back down to the status bar now. If you look at the center of the status bar, you’ll notice that it contains a set of instructions. If you haven’t clicked on anything in the model, the bar should say “Select Objects. Shift to extend select. Drag mouse to select multiple.”

Basically, this bar will contain instructions for using whatever SketchUp tool you currently have selected, so if you’re trying to use a tool and you get stuck, make sure to check the status bar.

Finally, on the right side of the status bar, we’re going to check out the box that is the most important – the measurements box. On the right side of the screen, there is a box labeled “Measurements.”

This box can tell you information about the dimensions of whatever tool you’re currently working with, but it can also be used to input information to different tools. For example (and don’t worry, we’ll get into using tool WAY more in-depth in the future), lets say that you wanted to draw a line with the line tool.
Click on the little pencil at the top of the screen to activate the line tool.

Once you’ve done this, your cursor should change into a little pencil graphic. Using the tip of this pencil, click on the spot where the three axes converge.

Now drag your mouse around and take a look at your measurements box. There are two things you should notice. First, the word “measurements” has turned into the word “length.” This is because the name of the box will change to suit whatever tool you have active. For the circle tool, this word will turn into the word “radius.” This is useful because it helps you remember what measurements you can input for each tool. The second thing you should notice is that as you move your mouse around, numbers appear in the measurements box.

This is the length of the line you’re currently drawing. The measurements box will show the active dimension of whatever tool you’re currently working with. The nice thing about the measurements box is not only does it tell you dimensions, it also allows you to enter dimensions. If you still have the line tool active, this box should be white right now. If you don’t, activate the line tool and click once to set the first point of your line. Then, let’s say we want our line to be 12 feet long. With the line tool active, move your cursor to whatever direction you’d like your line to travel. Then, type the following and hit enter – 12’. This will draw a 12 foot line between the first point that you set and whatever direction your cursor is in.

As you can see, SketchUp draws a 12’ line from your original point. This a very powerful tool that we’ll discuss more at a later date.

This concludes part 2 of my SketchUp User Interface and Navigation Tutorial.

In the next tutorial, we’ll get into some basic tools that you can use in SketchUp. You can check that out here.

If you’d like to check out part 1 of this tutorial, you can access it here.

For other lessons, check out the SketchUp Tutorials section here.

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