I am new to sketchup, and not sure where to post this. Hopefully I am in the right forum?
Anyway, I drew this rectangle, and want to type in the exact dimension. But I cannot type in the box for some reason.
I don’t have a mouse, am doing this on a laptop, if that makes a difference. I’ve got the rectrangle drawn, and released the left button. so I then try to type in the dimension in the box, nothing happens. I’ve tried not releasing the left button, that does not work at all.
Don’t know what I’m doing wrong, and it’s driving me nuts.
Can anyone tell me how to do this please?
Thanks!
Ignore the box, start drawing a rectangle and release the left button, now type the dimensions in mid air and hit enter. Whatever you type will appear in the box and the rectangle will snap to those sizes.
So, click and release to start rectangle, move cursor in the direction you want, type 3m,5m enter and you will get a 3 meter by 5 meter rectangle. Type 3",5" enter and it will be 3 inches by 5 inches. All keyboard inputs for tools are done in mid air so to speak, start the action and type and finish by hitting enter.
I’m using it on a Mac Book Air, with a trackpad. So far, It’s working for me. It may not be quite as efficient as a mouse, but I haven’t found anything I can’t do. Yet.
There is nothing you can’t do. Just many things that are dramatically more awkward! (I use a MacBook, and encounter this each time I don’t plug in the mouse).
A mouse with a scroll wheel is essential for best use of SketchUp. You can pan, orbit, and zoom using such a mouse without changing the Tool you have active.
I’m using an old Microsoft mouse I had from a previous Windows laptop.
I started with SU 8 on my laptop with just the built in touch pad // left-right click. After two days I had the worst hand cramps in the world!! Wireless scroll wheel investment a necessity and learning the default and assigning hot keys a must…
I realized that in SU 2023 to draw a rectangle I need to type X,Y (where X and Y are numerical values).
Previously it was X;Y
I don’t know why they changed that.
In locales where a period (aka full stop) is used as the decimal place, SketchUp uses a comma to separate values. Where the decimal place is a comma, it uses a semi-colon.
It’s complex as I have an azerty keyboard but an english OS.
The keypad as a , (comma).
The problem is, I can’t type decimal values with my keypad anymore as Sketchup doesn’t interpret the comma as a period. It USED to correctly interpret it and it used to be easy to type decimal values with the keypad, but it seems they changed that since Sketchup 2022 (unless it’s a windows 11 issue).
Therefore I needed to configure an azerty with period to get Sketchup handle the comma on my keypad as a period, to be able to type decimals easily.
I just tested both (azerty with comma and azerty with period) and in both cases Sketchup only accepts comma as separator when typing values for a rectangle. No more semicolons accepted.
I was so used to type semicolons for rectangles that I thought Sketchup was bugged until I noticed it had switched to comma.
Jeez…
ok ok.
I understand a bit better how all this works. The issue I had was that I can’t access the menu you showed above and had to type “intl.cpl” in the search prompt to get direct access to that admin window. In Win7 and win10 it was pretty straightforward but with win11 this window need a backdoor approach.
So indeed when I forced the use of french (belgium) regional format AND Belgian (comma) as keyboard; then Sketchup worked as it used to.
Thanks everyone.
It always has been a struggle with SketchUp because it was the only app that didn’t correctly interpret the decimals of my num keypad. Fusion360 and Excel always correctly interpret them, even if the regional settings’s decimal symbol were period or comma.
