Google SketchUp: The Missing Manual

LayOut Program: The Quick Tour

Once you get past the getting started windows, you see the LayOut program window (Figure 16-5). If you've used a page layout program like Adobe InDesign or Microsoft Publisher, you'll feel right at home. The main portion of the window shows you a page in your document. Under the menus, you have tools for drawings and text. At right, you see dialog boxes—called trays in LayOut—including Colors, Shape Style, Text Style, Pages, and SketchUp Model. At bottom left, a status bar provides hints and displays messages like "Auto Save Complete." Sharing the status bar is the Measurements box, which works like SketchUp's Measurements toolbar.

Figure 16-4. The Save As Template window shows two boxes: Template Name and Template Folder. LayOut automatically selects My Templates as a location for your new template, but you can select any of the other folders in the list.

Figure 16-5. The first time you open LayOut, you see the workspace organized much as this example is. You can rearrange things by dragging the Default tray or Main toolbar to different locations.

Menus

As in SketchUp, LayOut's menus are a sure path to every tool, window, and tray (Figure 16-6). Mostly you use the menu commands to work with files. Besides using them to open and close documents, you use menus ...