Master These Simple, Smart Features for Increased Efficiency

Imagine working on a complex model and never having to move your cursor more than a fraction of the way across your screen to access any tool or action you need. The Vectorworks product line provides features specifically designed to enhance the flow of your work by keeping you focused on the drawing area, speeding up tasks, and reducing interruptions in your creative process.

Here’s how a few key features — Smart Options Display, Quick Search, Onscreen View Control, and Object Context menus — help streamline your workflow, ensuring every click and command keeps you right where you need to be: in the design.

The Smart Options Display makes accessing tools as easy as a quick tap of the space bar or middle mouse button. With this feature, you no longer need to break your concentration by moving to a docked palette or screen edge to activate tools.

The Smart Options Display’s four quadrants can be customized with the tools and commands you use most. For instance, if you’re modeling a building, you might set up one quadrant with Building Shell tools, making it a breeze to access walls, windows, and doors. 

The Smart Options Display pops up after a short delay (10 seconds by default) or by pressing the space bar, and you can even turn off these triggers if they’re not needed.

When time is of the essence, Quick Search allows you to access any tool or command by typing the first few letters of its name. Activated with a single keystroke (default is “F”), this feature makes remembering menu or palette locations a thing of the past.

Quick Search also “learns” your habits. After a few uses, it prioritizes the tools and commands you reach for most frequently, so they’re always just a few keystrokes away.

By default, the Quick Search window appears in the center of your drawing area, though you can place it wherever it’s most convenient for your workflow. Start typing “o-f-f,” for example, and the Offset Edge tool pops up — perfect for those moments when you need access to a tool at a moment’s notice.

Onscreen View Control, a small but powerful visual navigation tool located in the lower-left corner of the drawing area, eliminates the need to toggle back and forth between menu commands to adjust views. This feature is invaluable, especially for those working with complex 3D models.

The cube at the bottom of your screen lets you quickly switch between standard views, from 3D perspectives to a 2D top/plan view, with just a click.

Clicking different edges and corners of the cube switches specific viewing angles, and dragging the cube allows for a flyover navigation, providing complete control over the view of your project. For laptop users without access to a numeric keypad, the Onscreen View Control brings essential navigation capabilities right to the drawing area.

Often overlooked but extremely powerful, Object Context menus give you a quick-access menu of commands specific to the object you’re working with. Simply right-click on an object, and you’ll see a list of actions, from general commands to specific object-related tasks, making it simple to execute frequent actions.

By default, these menus are organized for efficiency, with general commands at the top and object-specific options below. With enhancements to the Workspace Editor in Vectorworks 2025, you can customize these menus to bring your most-used commands even closer.

Examples: When working in a layered project, you can use the Object Context Menu to quickly activate the class or layer of an existing object, allowing you to focus in on specific elements quickly. Other powerful commands, like “Create Objects from Shapes…,” speed up the creation of BIM objects from simple 2D shapes when activated with an Object Context Menu.

Each of these capabilities is designed with speed and accessibility in mind, helping you stay focused, reduce distractions, and keep your cursor where it belongs: on your design.