How to use the Fusion 360 interface and some important settings to be aware of coming up first, you've got your main data panel, and this is where you can see files that have been shared with you, as well as all the files that you're creating.

You can start a new project and within a project, this is where we can upload or import files or start a new folder and further manage our designs. On the left. You have a browser, you can see the file name. You can see what's active when it comes to multiple components where you can select each one and make it active. You can expand and look at bodies as well as select this visibility control. This main command bar appears where you can change between the different workspaces. You can do a lot in the design workspace where you're creating Solidworks geometry, as well as doing assemblies, but this is where you can access the cam space, generative design simulation, and the rest.

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The timeline down below allows you to track your order of operations, as well as go back and edit and reorder features as needed. Clicking. A new tab allows a new design or new file coming down to the bottom. You're going to find a very important setting for beginners, and that is this grid and snaps. Some people love sketching with the grid capability and some don't. So if we start a sketch and select the front plane, now when I'm sketching, you're going to notice that it's snapping to these little points, right? All these little grid snaps like this reminds me of when I was in college in engineering school, my little green engineering paper, right? I was leveraging that to make some of these simple sketches. When I come down, I can set the grid settings and there's this adaptive versus fixed. So adaptive is going to kind of scale up and down, depending on how large of a design you're working on versus fixed.

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It's going to work with incremental numbers and you can set that spacing and set the subdivisions. Okay. So some of the other options, you have the different types of orbit, the ability to do the look at. So if I'm kind of looking at at a strange angle, I can use the look at capability. It's going to zoom right on. And since we're talking about viewing and angles, this view cube is incredibly helpful by selecting different faces or these inputs. You can move 90 degrees at a time. You can rotate at nineties as well. Hitting the home screen takes you to your home view, panning the ability to move something around on the screen, zoom to fit. I use this one all the time, especially when I've messed it up. I usually use it the shortcut on my mouse, but it's good to know. It's F six, the fit, uh, versus the zoom window.

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I like this one as well, where you can zoom into a specific area display settings. Sometimes this pops up, people ask, why is it in wire frame? Why can't I see it in wireframe? Right? So this is where you can access your shaded shaded with edges wire frame. So how could I see four different views of the same design come down, find view ports. And this is where you can see all those four different views, as well as that manipulation happening when you're making adjustments to your view or your camera angle. So this is a great way to get feedback. If you're trying to understand a complex design, you can see it in multiple different ways all at once. And these can be kind of configured, right? So I can come up and get this just how I need it. And then adjust this slightly differently as well.

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This is our notification. So if you are collaborating with someone or get a Fusion 360 update, you can get that. And then job satis, this one's very important because it lets you leverage the offline mode, which can be an advantage when you're working with spotty internet, or for some reason you don't want your files sinking to the cloud. Um, as often check out the offline video that I did. I'll link that down below. Before I get into preferences, I'm going to talk about the help menu. This is where you can find some existing tutorials that are, have already been done by like the Fusion 360 team. This is where the forum is, is great place to ask questions. The gallery is really cool. The roadmap, all of these are super helpful for growing your skillset. You can also launch the what's new and read up as well as they usually do a live video explaining all the new features.

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Okay. So jumping into preferences, just a few things I'm going to do. I'm going to do a separate video for settings and Fusion 360. So check that link below. I'll add that as soon as that's uploaded, but a few very specific things that you, the beginner need to know about the graphics driver. If you are having problems with your graphics card or your graphics crashing or Fusion 360 crashing, there is that diagnostics that you can actually find in the help menu. Check that out. What about the offline cash period? So this kind of controls how long that your files are going to be stored your hard drive and in the cloud, right? So you might do 60 days, 90 days dependent on how much room you have on your hard drive. And if that is concern, I like to keep my recovery time at five minutes.

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That's the lowest that'll go. That helps just protect me if my recovery and auto-save are going more often that in, in case I forget to save, then I might be able to capture my work five minutes ago. The rest of these are pretty straight forward. Um, the one thing to be aware of is do you want to zoom pan rotate like another software? So for example, Solidworks. So I actually do work with Solidworks pretty often. So I'm, it helps me if I keep them similar in lined up. If you're working with a mentor in Fusion 360 or just Fusion 360, you might just consider using the inventor in Fusion 360 setup. The other one I want to look at is the design. So a few of these now by default, I just hit restore defaults just a few minutes ago when we were talking. So I hit that again. Um, so a few that I love, I definitely like to capture my design history by default. And I definitely like to look at the sketch directly when I'm starting a new sketch. And I like my dimensions to open that edit dialogue. I love that one that I do use as well as the project geometry on the sketch. But this one, I definitely turn on this scale after first sketch the second to the bottom, this one's debatable. Now, if you turn this off, what this is going to do, if I start a sketch

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okay, what it's done is the sketch is still visible. And I could leverage it again easily by default, the sketch will be consumed and be hidden by this feature. So do you want it automatically visible? Um, it's kind of depends on your workflow. I kinda like them to be hidden after I'm done with them. And then I turn them on again, when I want to reuse them. The other thing to be aware of are these preview features. Some of these are up and coming technology like edit in place, which is really cool and needs its own video, but a lot of these cool workspaces and capabilities that we sometimes leverage on this channel and in tutorials can be found on the preview interface. So they're not quite released functionality, but you can use them today.

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Hey, so if you're just starting out with Fusion 360, check out these videos I made just for you, a brand new user getting started. Some of these have exercises that you can download as well to get started and start practicing with Fusion 360 as well as the offline video that I mentioned. If you want to learn how to turn on that offline and leverage it, check out this video or the 23 tips, the beginner should learn, check out one of these videos, keep growing. I'll see you in the next video.