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I Want MOM Back!
By Pete Pickett, Mercury MerCruiser
In this day and age, I’m all about trying to speed things up in Pro/ENGINEER. I recently discovered that some functions in older versions of Pro/E are faster than in Wildfire, Wildfire 2 and Wildfire 3. So, I want My Old Menus back!
When Wildfire was introduced, PTC bragged about reducing mouse clicks to do your job. Well, here are a few overlooked places in Pro/DETAIL where MOM can help.
Tip 1: Moving Items in a Drawing
Cleaning up a drawing, for example, requires two picks on the object and one more to place it. If you add the old move function used way back in Pro/ENGINEER release 19, you get faster results.
Create a mapkey:
mapkey v @MAPKEY_LABEL*move (detail move);#detail;#move
Now moving a dimension text or balloon is just two clicks away. This means that if you have 300 balloons or dimensions to set up in a drawing, you have 600 clicks rather than 900! This was tested and worked in pre-production Wildfire 3.
Tip 2: Adding Text to a Table
Is the TABLE pull-down menu driving you nuts? Can’t select the table just right to get these functions to highlight?
If you want to add text to a single cell in a table without the massive PROPERTIES box, just add this mapkey:
mapkey EC @MAPKEY_LABEL*ADD TEXT TO TABLE;#TABLE;#ENTER TEXT
Not only does this restore the old function of quickly adding text to a cell, but it also brings back the old table menu (from Pro/ENGINEER 2001), which lets you edit the table faster than a pull-down.
Note: The COPY/COPY TABLE function works differently than EDIT/COPY in Wildfire. Let’s say you are using an automated BOM table with an assembly. You add a different assembly to the same drawing and you want to copy that same table but reference the new assembly. This is what COPY/COPY TABLE does. EDIT/COPY references the original assembly.
Tip 3: Editing a Single Line of Text
Sometimes that PROPERTIES box drives me nuts when I want to quickly edit a line of text in a large note. You have to resize it, drag the scroll bar to where you want it, or simply need to break up the text for different size fonts for each line.
Here’s a mapkey to deal with this nuisance:
mapkey ed @MAPKEY_LABEL*EDIT TEXT LINE;#modify;#text;#text line
If you have more legacy mapkeys or menus you access, please email me and I will add them into another article, I Want MOM Back Too! 
Peter A. Pickett II is a design engineer at Mercury MerCruiser in Stillwater, Oklahoma. A Pro/ENGINEER user since release 10, Pete currently serves as chair of the PTC/USER Routed Systems Technical Committee and co-chair of the Oklahoma Pro/ENGINEER Users Group. He can be reached by email at Pete_Pickett@mercmarine.com.
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