Customize Trados Studio to meet your individual needs
8 min read
Everyone has their own way of working that makes them more productive, and this often extends to personalizing the software that is central to their job. Some people, for example, love keyboard shortcuts and want to be able to create their own. Some prefer to customize the ribbon or quick access toolbar (features common to Microsoft Office products and our Trados Studio CAT tool).
Like every piece of modern software, Studio has a long list of preferences – mostly accessible through File > Options – to make it work the way you want. Whether it’s keyboard shortcuts, customizing the ribbon (or making it disappear), changing the editor’s working font size, tailoring your autocorrect list, or a thousand other details, you can change the interface in both permanent and temporary ways to be more efficient. And if you realize, after playing around with settings, that you don’t like the way it’s working, you can always hit the ‘Reset to Defaults’ button in any settings dialog to undo the changes you’ve made.
If you can customize something in other common Windows software, it’s likely you can do so in Studio too. If you’re not sure whether a customization is possible in Studio, try searching for it in the ‘Tell me what you want to do’ box. Failing that, the RWS Community forums may have an answer, or you can post your own question there.
In this blog, I’m going to focus on a few ways to personalize Studio that relate more specifically to the translation workflow.
Work-pane windows: put them wherever you want
Studio offers seven different views (welcome, projects, files, editor, translation memories, reports and alignment), each of which has a navigation pane and work pane beneath the ribbon. Four of these views – projects, files, editor and translation memories – have their work pane further divided into a main view area and a number of windows.
The views differ in how many windows they have and where you find them (most windows are in tabs above or below the main view area, but there are others as well).
The important common feature of all of these windows is that they can be resized and moved. You can drag any window by its title bar and then do one of three things:
- Dock it in a different position (direction indicators show you where this is possible), which Studio will then remember as your choice.
- Float the window over the view without docking it (which again, Studio will remember).
- Drag it right out of the view onto your computer desktop (if Studio isn’t using all the space) – or to another screen if you’re using multiple screens. So you could, for example, have a preview of the final document permanently open and in view as you work in the editor window. Or work with the advanced display filter permanently open on your second screen.
Nicole Loney
All from Nicole Loney
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