Why are the simplest things so hard in SU?
Why can i not rotate or copy and rotate.
So annoying to research simple things.
Al it does is make a guide line or copy the guide line.
Use the rotate tool not the protractor tool.
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Why do you insist on trying to do things with the wrong tools?
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I thought they were the same tool.
What is the difference?
The move is sometimes a rotator the protractor is sometimes a mover.
Why all the duplicity?
The yellow Protractor has never been a āmoverā.
The Move tool does have a Rotate function to rotate objects about their centers. Itās a quick and easy option.
but it is the same interface.
What makes it change?
Use the Rotate tool.
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Protractor creates guides and measures angles.
Rotate rotates things.
Move moves things and has a useful added bonus of being able to spin groups and components about their center.
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I cannot make an Onion Dome with the Rectangle tool!
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Seems possible to me that you havenāt got to grips with what the native tools each does.
Visit learn.sketchup.com.
The source of the OPās confusion is no doubt that the gizmo that appears when you activate either the protractor or the rotate tool is the same 
.
It is easy to become confused about which you have activated.
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No experienced user has much problem with using the two tools or understanding the difference. So this is part of a learning curve.
You have been posting since June 2019 and have often seemed unhappy with Sketchup. Perhaps other software would suit you better?
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There are a Move Tool and a Rotate Tool to move and rotate objects.
Then there are a Tape Measure Tool and a Protractor Tools to measure linear distances and angular distances. These two tools also have the option of creating linear guides (with the tape Measure Tool) and angular guides (with the Protractor Tool).
All this is logical and very functional.
When you select and then use a Tool, look at the Status Bar under the modelling area. You will get a lot of informations pertaining to the choosen tool. When you get more knowledgeable with SketchUp, you can spend less and less time looking at this Status Bar.
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Ahhh Ha HA this is so totally typical of SketchUp.
I thought they were the same tool and with different functions.
I thought choosing Protractor or Rotator just activated the different functions of the same tool.
I use the KeyStrokes to change tools so if it was protracting and i wanted it to rotate i would give it a Q.
Thought that was just changing the function of the same tool.
It is still way to hard to get the center point of arcs to show up with any reliability.
Iāll just keep stumbling along through the biarpatch of SketchUp.
Thanks for the help.
If they made a professional help system I would not be here.
Yes we are well aware of your disdain, but we do out best to help anyway.
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I wish the status bar had 3x more information and it was always on top.
I inherit a lot of drawings so i do not trust anything and rely on that info.
I just donāt use SU enough to remember all the eccentricities and I am trained in AutoCAD so I want that kind of precision.
I wish I had enough work to get fluid but the weirdness is real so I loose interest until the next job.
SketchUp is capable of as much precision as you can specify - as precise as 0.001 inch anyway - which for Architecture, and most mechanical drawing, is as precise as you need.
In what way is AutoCad āmore preciseā?
It works very differently, and perhaps part of your difficulty with SketchUp is that you expect it to work similarly.
By design, it doesnāt.
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Hi Lee, hi folks.
SketchUp (SU) is easy to use. So much in fact that I tried it without reading any help when I first started. I was also used to AutoCAD and PowerDraw on Mac.
Then I discovered SU help Menu and learned the philosophy of this modelling software. Note the term āModelingā, not just āDrawingā. At that time AutoCAD was more like an electronic drafting table to my eyes while SU was like sculpting an object. In my next attempts with SU, I turned on the Instructor Window and then I learned a lot. Try it. You can turn this window on and off at will.
Go to Youtube and search for SketchUp, more specifically the SketchUp channel, and you will discover a wealth of informations, going from basic instructions on the various tools to incredible modelling techniques demonstrated by experts. Take a look at some of the live modelling videos.
I have been using SU since Version 3 and I am still discovering new tricks and learning new modelling methods.
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Actually, I seem to remember that internally AutoCad has more floating point precision in its numbers, but it should be nothing of concern to ordinary humans.
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