This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
Customizing TOAD to User Taste
There are two key functionalities that any new TOAD user should spend a few moments investigating and adjusting to suit his or her likes or needs—because doing so will radically enhance your productivity. TOAD is shipped with many defaults chosen to apply to a universal and generic audience of millions. There's no way that you'll find all of these preselected defaults acceptable. TOAD is highly customizable, however, so it's easy to make TOAD look and work the way you prefer. This process is painless—and well worth the time spent on it.
First, the TOAD menus and toolbars can be customized by navigating to them and pressing the right-hand mouse key. You will then see a context menu that offers several choices; simply choose the "Customize..." option. TOAD will display a window that shows all the menu and toolbar icons and commands that are available. You can then drag and drop items from this customize window onto the menus and toolbars, or from the menus and toolbars to this window. Doing so will move the selected items back and forth. You can also select items on the existing menus and toolbars and move them around (i.e., rearrange them). In just a few moments' time, you can transform TOAD's primary interface into something that better fits your own personal work style.
Second, and most important, TOAD is a mature application that includes more than 10 years' worth of features. Many of those features have or offer options on how they should look and function. Again, TOAD is supremely customizable and offers you the ability to define numerous default behaviors. Simply click the toolbox icon with three check marks on the main toolbar, or choose the following items from the main menu: View → TOAD Options. Either will result in displaying the TOAD Options screen shown in Figure 1.4. Take the time to navigate, learn, and set many of these values. Note that a search function is available to help you quickly locate items that you might be looking for among the plethora of choices. Use this search feature whenever necessary; it's the single best way to find things quickly. In fact, the majority of user questions about issues such as "Can TOAD do this?" and "Where do I set that?" could be answered by a quick options search. Think of this functionality as being equivalent to a Google search, and use it just as often as you do Web searches. You may need to be a little creative on what you search for, but you can also answer the vast majority of your TOAD-related questions by simply doing a search. So use the search function—you will find good things.
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Figure 1.4 The TOAD Options Window