If you’re looking to change your PCB editor measurements, if you need to demonstrate components or traces as imperial units, then you’ll need to locate your board options. Another thing that we should mention is that instead of “Metric” and “Imperial,” Altium Designer now refers to units of measurement as “MM” (Millimeters) or “Mils” units. This has now moved to the properties panel, which can be accessed from the “Panels” button. In previous versions of the PCB editor in Altium Designer, the units were changed in the “Board Options” menu. On the PCB layout side of Altium Designer, things a little different. The Toggle Units command in the View pulldown menu Switching from MM to Mils in Layout In this case, the command is in the “View” pulldown, so you would need to use the keystroke combination of “vu” to change the units. This means that you can use this letter in a keystroke combination to toggle the units as well. Notice that the “U” in “Units” is underlined. Look closely at the picture below, and you can see that command in the pulldown menu. You can easily change units on the fly as you work by using the “Toggle Units” command in the “View” pulldown menu. You are not restricted to the PCB measurement units that were set up in the preferences when working in a schematic, however. The second allows you to set unit preferences for grids, while the third is for setting the units of your default primitive objects. The first is the main units for the schematic, which is found in the “General” settings of the preference dialog. In the picture above, you can see three different areas where you can set unit preferences for a new schematic in Altium Designer. Three different areas where you can set the units in Altium Design’s schematic preferences There are also different settings for PCB measurement units as you can see below. In the schematic, you can set up behaviors for just about everything from sheet templates to how it is going to zoom into PCB library components. The preferences dialog box gives you the ability to set up how you want the different tools in Altium Designer to behave when you first open them. Opening the Preferences dialog in Altium Designer You can also access these preferences with a schematic sheet open by going to the “Tools” pulldown menu and selecting “Preferences.” These preferences can be found by clicking on the gear wheel in the upper right corner of the Altium Designer as shown below. When you first open up Altium Designer, before you even move to the snap grid, you can set up some preferences for working in the schematic. Switching from MM to Mils in the Schematic Let’s take a quick look at how seamlessly switching between PCB measurement units can save you time. This kind of flexibility, along with a host of other system settings and preferences, can save you lots of time and headaches when it comes to working on your PCB designs. Altium Designer is an excellent example of a PCB design system that allows the user to easily switch from MM to Mils or Mils to MM. To our immense relief, CAD programs began to incorporate the ability to switch between units of measurement in their software, thereby eliminating the need for manual conversions. Designers had to arm themselves with a scratch pad, calculator, and a bottle of aspirin to constantly calculate the conversions between the two. The problem, however, was that many older data sheets and designs still referenced imperial measurements. Gradually, that began to change as the metric system became the standard unit of measurement. There was a time when the unit of measurement that a PCB designer utilized was dependent on the side of the world they were currently residing in.
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