Time-saving Solutions
for MicroStation^®

Multiple Versions of Your Function Keys
By Lorys Lea of Yarra Valley Water, Australia
Featured in ControlAltDelete - www.penbrush.com

Did you know you could have multiple versions of your Function key menu? Let’s say you have a bunch of macros, key-ins and so forth that are specific to some tasks to be carried out over a long project.

Normally, you would call up the macros and select them. But since they don’t always get used, you wouldn’t bother to assign them to your already crowded F key menu, right? A trick comes into play here. Draw up some function key overlays for your keyboard and make a few blank copies and print them out. Then open your function key menu (Workspace>Function Key).

From the “File” menu, make some function key menus and save them as MenuX.mnu, MenuY.mnu and MenuZ.mnu, etc.

Now, load your default function key funckey.mnu. We can now edit from here. Lets use F1 for this example. For F1 type in the following: ATTACH MENU menuX.mnu, FK SHIFT F1- ATTACH MENU menuY.mnu, FK and ALT F1 - ATTACH MENU menuZ.mnu, FK

Notice that the FK tells the function key dialog manager that we want a function key menu to be loaded. Within each of these function key menus you can set up your workflow specific function keys, for example, in menuY, I could set up F1 as wt=0;co=3;ft=1025;tx=3 and F2 as Macro mygrid.bas.

Note: Remember to assign one F Key to take you back to the original default function key menu, ATTACH MENU funckey.mnu,FK for example. Otherwise, you have to use the pull down to reload the original F key menu.

I would now go and label all of my keyboard overlays with all the appropriate custom F key names.

About the author
Lorys Lea has Mechanical drafting stream background and been using MicroStation since the mid 90's. He has experience in GIS mapping, survey and civil drafting. Lorys is currently at Yarra Valley Water. Click here to contact him.