MicroStation has lots of cool Tool Boxes — the problem sometimes becomes that there's way too many of them! How about we take some time to put together one (or more) custom Tool Boxes containing a selection of our favorites.

There's about thirty-eight ways to build a custom tool in MicroStation — e'll be talking about nearly all of them in upcoming articles. Right now, however, we'll start with one of the easiest ways to come up with cool, and useful, tools. It's the Bubba way — Shopping for Tools!

So open up yourself a Desgign File (don't matter which one!) and choose Workspace->Customize to get this show on the road. Once you do, the Customize facility is presented thusly...

This Customize facility has a lot going on for it — a lot more than we can cover right here 3 for now, all we need to know is that we're gonna be working with the Tool Boxes tab (the default presentation.) There's a list of all the Tool Boxes MicroStation knows about in the left-hand list, and in the right-hand window we'll find the Tool Box that is currently being worked on.

We need to create us a new, blank, Tool Box to put our Shoppping Selections in. It's easy — choose Create Tool Box from the drop-down in the right-hand list...

Next we need to give this Tool Box a name — I called mine Favorites...

Now the fun part! From any of the existing tool boxes in the left-hand list, we can drag a copy of a MicroStation tool over into our new tool box. A Double-Click expands the tool box so we can see what entries are available. Say we wanted to have the Window Area tool in our Favorites — just Drag-and-Drop it from the Left-hand list to the Right-hand...

Well, the Official way is to hilight the tool on the left and then hit Copy, but I'm far too lazy for that! Now just simply browse through the existing tools and Drag whatever you want over to the our new tool box...

Every once in awhile, it'd be a good idea to Save our work too, don't ya know. Once we've shopped for the selection of Favorites, and Saved our work, the new tool box is presented for our review... Note that it's resizable and stuff — just like regular MicroStation tool boxes.

If you want a bit more organization, Drag a couple of Spacers (from the top of the list) to place between items...

It makes a world of difference...

Have fun! And don't forget to save your work! When you're ready, flip to the next page and we'll pick up the discussion with more Quick-and-Dirty tools!