Searching Through The Maze of GeoTools / CADPower commands

Bangalore, India

Trying to search and locate a GeoTools/CADPower command can be a challenge, especially since each  product has so many of them arranged in ribbons, cascading pull-down menus and tool-bars. Veteran GeoTools user Andy Bills pointed out in this email to me today:

Whilst you and your colleagues provide such a wealth of handy tools, what has happened as a result is that it's often a bit of challenge to seek the right tool, or indeed see if there is a tool we can make use of.

 

I may hazard a guess to say that users may well not realise what abilities they have, and end up under-using GeoTools or CADPower.

 

I wonder if you could develop a method, in the help, or preferably in the interface itself, a way to type in keyword so that a user can find all the tools to do with say TEXT, or POLYLINES etc.

 

Essentially some kind of search function.

 

For example, I am trying to see if a tool exists where I can alter the z value of a point by clicking on a text object (similar to Assign Contour Elevations from Text Objects, but for a point object rather than polyline). There's so many tools, it's difficult to search.

 

What do you think?

 

Kind regards

Andy Bills
WHELANS, Australia

I must acknowledge that this is indeed a justified point. I myself find it difficult to locate tools that I know exist, but don't exactly know where. The easiest way to locate them is by searching the CHM user manual by keywords. Go to GeoTools -> Help, open the CHM file and go to the "Search" tab and type in keywords. The search results will show where those keywords appear in the entire user-manual. You can locate your tools easily this way.

Trying to find the tool that Andy wanted, I aggregated his requirement into keywords. I started with "assign properties" as my search keyword as this best describes what he wanted. This led me to the "GeoTools Object Conversion Toolkit page" as the first search result. Searching further in this page led me to the GT_ASN_PROP command which was exactly what he wanted.

I hope this tip will be helpful to fellow GeoTools users who want to find their way around using our software. 

Discover Bricscad, discover GeoTools-AutoCAD , GeoTools-Bricscad, CADPower-AutoCAD, CADPower-Bricscad, discover TechCenter. Brand new ways to work smarter in CAD!!