How Do I Save and Restore My Custom TBC Menus

We often get asked how to setup and manage your menu configurations, custom toolbars, quick access toolbars and command shortcuts. These are all created and stored in your menu configuration.

Once created, you can export a menu config file from TBC to a folder using the command - Support - Customize Ribbon - Export or Import. Save the file somewhere safe on your computer where it will not be affected by a TBC Update e.g. \Documents\TBCMaster\Menus and Toolbars\ etc.

Note that the Menu for e.g. TBC v5.4 can be used in v5.5, however any new commands added in 5.5, while they can be added back to your custom menus, you will lose the icons. The only way to create a fully valid menu for v5.5 is to create a menu based on the default menu for v5.5.

Here are some recommendations / comments to manage your system setup

To set up your menus as you will use the commands called

Customize Ribbon from the Support Menu to load a different menu system e.g. the Rockpile Menus vs the standard TBC Trimble menus

Set Ribbon Tabs from the support Menu to turn On / Off menus that you need from within the Menu Ribbon

So to reset your menus go to the Support Menu and then select Set Ribbon Tabs and at the bottom click Reset to Defaults - this will reset the TBC standard menus. If for any reason the menus kind of disappear then hit F12 to open the command pane and find Set Ribbon Tabs in the list of recent commands and run the process a second time to get the menus back. If you do this I would also go to the Tool Shed Menu and then select Menu Manager and from that command I would click Reset RPS Menus and Refresh Icons to make sure that the RPS Menus are correctly installed again.

Once you have reset your menu ribbons you then want to turn on / off the menus that you need - from the standard menus I would start with the following being On and the others being Off - You can turn menus On / Off in the Support Menu - select Set Ribbon Tabs and then switch On / Off the ribbons as you see fit - these are the ones I would use most often for construction work

Home
CAD
Drafting
Surfaces
Corridors
Point Clouds (If you support point cloud data from Drones or Scanners)
Construction Data (If you support Machines and Field Systems)
Data Prep
Takeoff (If you have the Takeoff Module)
Utility (If you have the Utilities module)
RPS Data Prep
RPS Modeling
RPS Tool Shed
Support

I typically turn menus off if I am not using them and then turn them on when I need them etc. You can save a menu configuration when you are happy with it using the Customize Ribbons command from the Support menu (use the Export function to save out the file to a location) - I use \Documents\TBCMaster\ and then I have folders for all my custom TBC stuff like Menus, Project Templates, Text Styles, Label Styles, Color Maps, RPS Settings Files etc. so I have a safe copy that is unaffected by updates to TBC from which I can quickly restore my setup if I do an upgrade etc. If you ever lose your menu setup, you can then use the same command and Import the menus again to reset your system as you like it.

Once you have saved your menu configuration, I recommend that you do a File and Exit TBC the official way because the menu configuration gets saved and written to the default location as you do this. If you click the X in top right corner, that bypasses the system save settings and doesn’t save the changes you have made.

If you want to change the menu configuration and add commands to different menus - you can do that through the customize Ribbons command in the support menu. After you make changes - save a copy of your new config as above and File Exit to make it semi permanent in your setup.

When making changes like this, I recommend that you only have one instance of TBC open. When you have more than one instance open, changes you make are not saved because the files are in a locked state by the other instances you have running.

The menu configuration files contain the settings for the following

  1. The Quick Access Toolbar - at the top of your screen - the icons that give you rapid access to key TBC functions like Import, Export, New Project, Save Project, Undo, redo, Delete etc. - any changes to these are done through the Customize Ribbon command and can be saved in your menu config file

  2. Custom Toolbars - created with the Customize Tools command are created and stored in the Menu Config file - These create additional toolbars to TBC commands that you can place along the top, sides or bottom of the graphics windows to give you quicker access to commands as you need them. You can load our custom toolbars using the Toolbar Manager command from our Tool Shed menu - enclosed is a Toolbar Settings file - save the file in your TBC Master folder with your RPS Settings files if you want to use it.

  3. Keyboard Shortcuts to commands that you use a lot - these are set up using the Define Command Shortcuts command in the Support menu. They are all setup in our custom menu configuration but not in the TBC standard menus - unfortunately we don’t currently have a way to load those into a different menu system - so you would have to add them as you see fit.

Make sure that you back up your custom setup prior to updating TBC otherwise you will lose all of your setups during an update.

RPS Custom Toolbars (for use with the RPS Toolbar Manager command):
Save the file below into your RPS Settings folder in \Documents\TBC Master\RPS Settings\ (or wherever you have that set in RPS Settings command under File Locations.

Toolbars.rps (4.2 KB)

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