Settings

Open the Settings button in the Thundercad tab. The window has a navigation bar on the left with one tab per tool, and at the top a title + subtitle of the active tab.

At the bottom is the version number and the Show tour button with which you can replay the tour.

The General tab contains:

• Frequent Folder and default export folder.
• Default behavior for Batch Open and Quick save/load.
• License status and your license key.
• Import/Export of all your Thundercad settings (e.g. to share with a colleague).

On the Printer tab, set which printer or plotter the Print button uses, which paper size belongs to which sheet size, and the margins/orientation.

On the Drawing Updater tab you choose the template file against which existing drawings are compared: title block, border and drawing styles. Here you also decide which parts are overwritten.

The Model Cleaner tab is a list of checkboxes for each action of the tool: collapse browser, alphabetical sorting, ISO view, part number update, creating a flat pattern and hiding work features. Check what you want to run by default.

The Publish tab controls the behavior of Batch Publish and the individual export buttons:

• Which formats are enabled by default.
• Naming of output files (based on iProperties).
• Output folder per format.
• Translator settings for DWG and DXF.
• Folders to exclude.

On the BOM Export tab you map your Excel template columns to iProperties. You can also decide whether subassemblies are included, how rows are sorted, and whether section headers are generated. The export is one click afterwards.

On the Find Item tab you control how the search action works: which iProperty counts as the item number, whether you also want to zoom in the source assembly, and which colors are used for highlights.

On the Update BOM tab, set where the default BOM style file is located. With one click on the tool, this style is loaded into the active assembly.

The Drawing Checker tab contains checkboxes for each check the tool can perform, updating author/date, checking balloons, sorting the parts list, detecting text overrides. Turn on what you want by default.

The On Save tab controls what should happen automatically when a document is saved: for example updating an iProperty field, forcing a view state, or writing a log line. On/off per action.

On the General tab you find buttons to export all your Thundercad settings to a file and import them again, handy for pushing the same configuration to colleagues or restoring it after a reinstall.

The Number Generator is tied to Save As and Copy Design. For a new part or assembly it pulls the next number from the active sequence. For a drawing it deliberately works differently: a drawing belongs to the model it depicts, so it does not consume a new number from the sequence but reuses that model's number.

When you save a drawing, the add-in finds the model the drawing shows (the first view on the first sheet). The file name is automatically proposed as that model's name, but with the correct drawing file type. So a drawing of P-1000.ipt is proposed as P-1000.idw (or .dwg, depending on which drawing format is primary). Above the name field you then see Model number: followed by the reused number, and the sequence field and the Generate button are disabled, because nothing new needs to be generated.

The sequence prefix used is stored on the document as the iProperty NGPrefix. The drawing therefore inherits the same prefix as its model, rather than whatever sequence happened to be active at save time. If the add-in finds no model to derive from (it isn't a drawing, or the model hasn't been saved yet), it falls back to generating a new number.