Ctrl+drag does indeed work for moving tools from the native toolbars to your custom toolbars. If it isn't working for you, check your keyboard. You do have to have the toolbars window open while customizing the toolbars. You can also just drag the tools over without holding Ctrl. If you want to restore the tools on the native toolbars, click on Reset.

You're not alone in this Frank.

Excellent! Glad you got it sorted.

Good on you, Frank. Just as in SketchUp, you have to purge out the unused stuff once in awhile.

Hi Frank, Open the Materials window and click on the Details menu icon on the right edge of the window. Select Open or Create... Navigate to the folder containing the materials you're after and choose Open. Go to the Details menu again and click 'Add to favorites.' That ought to take care of it.

lapx, it's been covered repeatedly here on the forum. You can copy your templates, styles, materials. Don't copy plugins, though. Download fresh copies. Many plugins needed updating with the switch to Ruby 2.0 in SU2014. This shouldn't be an onerous task since most plugins are available through either the Sketchucation Plugin Store or the Extension Warehouse which will both automatically install the plugins you select. It might be a good time to pare down the list of plugins in your Plugins folder anyway. Setting up toolbars shouldn't take you very long. On the PC you can make custom toolbars for the native tools if you wish. It's quick and easy and can buy you a bit of toolbar real estate because you can eliminate buttons you don't need and by combining tools from multiple toolbars you can get rid of a bunch of those dividers.

Thanks, Thomas, for your help and response. For some reason, I thought the Solar North was included in SU 2013 (much like some of the camera plug-ins). But my memory is getting feebler by the minute, so I'm sure your're right. I think that the idea of better integration of the EW with SketchUp is really good and it seems that the ability to truly customize SU without a bunch of features that you won't use much is forward thinking and useful. I'll go about getting the Solar North plug-in and installing it, and while I'm at it, I'll look around to see what other customization options might be available. Thanks again!!

The rtf ( rich text format ) is not really a text format. EXCEL has the option of export a CSV ( comma separated variable ) text files that may be better for you . Have you tried that? I guess you have not looked at the link I took the time to post for you. Nick Sonder posted a number of videos answering some of your questions and probably worth a peak at least. I do not know how layout materials and SU ones interact I do not use layout, free user here , but It has been my experience when file size grow like that many times it is related to photo texture materials being used. Try using monochrome rendering style to reduce load on the graphics processor and see if that helps. You can also save your materials as a collection which creates a skm file you can look at and give you an idea of possible areas to check for large texture files. That is a zip file format so if you want to actually extract and check the image file with an editor then you will have to unzip them or at least the large ones of possible interest. BTW Nick Sonder makes a specific comment about using raster vs vector rendering in layout to help with file size. BTW 2; Given you have 32 memory implies you have a 64 bit machine. However, SU runs as a 32 bit application and such it can only address 4 Gb of that , the kernel can use more than 4 depending some what on your MB and what can be set in the BIOS. Unlike x86 machines where in the kernel and application split the memory ( so each only can use 2 Gb of the max 4Gb addressable on 32 bit machines) One of the first steps is to purge the skp file to remove all unused items.

Nice! Works like a champ. Many thanks!

Would you e-mail a LayOut file that shows the problem so I can see it?

At this time the only text files that LayOut is officially intended to take are RTFs. I think you've hit on a couple of points but you'll probably get better results if you copy your table from Excel and paste it in a blank Word doc. Most projects I do in LayOut involve at least one table. The data is exported from SketchUp as a CSV file which I massage and rearrange in Excel before going to Word. I dislike the appearance of the straight tables so I convert tables to tab-separated text. Usually I do a few other things in Word including pasting in some boilerplate text before saving as an RTF file. This file imports into LayOut flawlessly and as long as I remember not to try editing it in LO directly, I can always open it for editing in Word. It seems like a convoluted path but for me it is workable. I've done so many of them now that the steps are sort of a process I can do quite rapidly.

Auto Scale was the answer. I KNEW it was probably a simple setting, but just didn't know where to look. Many thanks!! Frank

Wow, thanks Philip! I learned a lot from your example. First, component wrapping comes BEFORE axis changing. Next I really didn't understand how to propagate a variable through nested components. The trick is parent! I know what the ! means, but I was having trouble figuring out how to make a reference within the nested components that made sense. I probably could have constructed something, but your solution is much more streamlined (and intuitive). Finally, I had not thought about using a logical sequence to drive the values of the variables. In hindsight, the solution is pretty straightforward, but for the life of me I couldn't figure it out. All in all, pretty clever! Thanks, again, for your extremely helpful post. I'm off and fixing a number of other DCs that I made that have similar issues. Frank.

I am having the same problem inserting rtf files - they look fine in Wordpad but are scrambled in Layout - I tried all the tricks mentioned above in this thread to no avail - I also tried your suggestion to "drag and drop" the rtf file into Layout but it does not work for me. When I double click on the table, it straightens up but then goes back to scrambled?? Any suggestions or work arounds? again, I tried all above and confused!! Thanks

Yup that helps, thanks Frank. I'll look into it.

Frank, I'm glad you got things to work. I always like to suggest native tools and if they work, great. If you need additional stuff, plugins Like Chris Fullmer's are great. As to your question, the standard views are standard for the default orientation of the axes. They don't get changed when you change the model axes The reason they work for you when you have a component open for editing is because the orientation is then based upon the component axes. The orientation of the component axes is driven by the alignment of the component to the model axes. So, when you have the component open for editing, the standard front view would have you looking at the model with the solid green axis running away from you.

Moved from the Bugs forum. As it turned out there were some stray lines as part of the template. A bit of cleanup and the problem is solved.

Hi Dave, Must be electron magic. It has happened to me on several occasions on two separate models. It doesn't happen every time, but often enough to be quite annoying. I found that the autosave feature was very useful in these instances. I'll keep an eye on it, and I'll start reporting this to the Sketchup folks. Thanks for your help!

I sent the following email to Enmesh yesterday....... Sent: Wednesday, July 03, 2013 11:12 PM To: info@enmesh.se Subject: [Enmesh.com contact form] Go-Sim Lite for SketchUp V8 Free Joel Berson sent a message using the contact form at http://www.enmesh.se/contact. I've seen a video of Go-Sim on SU, but I find no reference to that version on your product offerings. Does it still exist? How do I get a copy? Thanks jgb ================================= And their reply................. Hi! Unfortunately, there is no version available SketchUp. It was only developed as a demo a few years back. The only plugins available are for SpaceClaim and IronCAD. Sincerely yours, Jonas Niklasson, Enmesh ============ Bummer