The command bar

The command bar is located at the top of the screen. The CommandManager contains all the SOLIDWORKS commands that are used for building models. It contains different categories of commands, and each category contains a set of different commands. A close-up of the command bar is shown in the following screenshot:

Different categories (tabs) of commands correspond to different functions. For example, in the Sketch category/tab, you will find all the commands that we will need in the sketching phase. In the Features category/tab, you will find all the commands that we will need in order to go from the sketching phase and start creating a 3D model. The categories that are shown in the preceding screenshot are not the only ones SOLIDWORKS provides, but they are the most common ones we will use. To show the hidden Commands categories, we can do the following: 

1. Right-click on any of the Commands categories. This will make the following menu appear, which contains more Commands categories, such as Surfaces, Weldments, Mold Tools, and so on. 

1. Select the categories you want to be shown. By doing this, these categories will be added to the command bar:

This concludes our overview of the command bar, which contains the different commands we will use as we build 3D models. Now, we will look at the design tree.