{"id":19758,"date":"2017-03-30T10:00:28","date_gmt":"2017-03-30T17:00:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.digilentinc.com\/?p=19758"},"modified":"2024-12-28T11:48:48","modified_gmt":"2024-12-28T19:48:48","slug":"why-you-need-to-use-quick-drop-if-youre-using-labview","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/digilent.com\/blog\/why-you-need-to-use-quick-drop-if-youre-using-labview\/","title":{"rendered":"LabVIEW Shortcuts: Why Quick Drop is Essential"},"content":{"rendered":"

Recently I wrote a blog post called “Tricks to Help You Increase Your LabVIEW Coding Speed<\/a>,” this post was about…. well I guess the title pretty much says it all. Somehow while writing this post, I forgot to mention the absolute greatest LabVIEW<\/a> trick in existence! I am of course talking about LabVIEW Quick Drop.Quick Drop allows you to rapidly find and place LabVIEW front panel and block diagram objects without navigating the palettes or initiating a search.<\/p>\n

I know that might not sound like much, but I promise you that by the end of this post you will question everything you’ve ever learned….. about LabVIEW at least.<\/p>\n

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Ya, I even use a Quick Drop mousepad, that’s how big a deal this is!<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

When I first started using LabVIEW<\/a>, I spent a significant amount of time fumbling through the functions palette after palette in LabVIEW looking for some a particular VI and most of the time I would accidentally click out of the palette, and I would have to start all over. Not only would this waste time but it would make me look like a crazy person, (well the yelling at my laptop in the middle of Starbucks did that) but you get the point.\u00a0My goal in this blog is to convince you that Quick Drop will save you a tremendous amount of time and frustration.<\/p>\n

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So how does Quick Drop work? \u00a0It allows you to place items by typing the name of the item you want. To launch Quick Drop at any time, just press CTRL+Space. \u00a0Like the palettes, the items that are available from this dialog depend upon whether the block diagram or front panel was active when you launched Quick Drop \u2013 unlike the palettes, Quick Drop can also place items (subVIs, controls, classes) that you have in your Project Explorer.<\/p>\n

When you press CTRL+Space on the block diagram, you\u2019ll see Quick Drop:
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Try typing the name of a standard function \u2013 for example, begin typing \u2018Build Array.\u2019 \u00a0After only a few letters, the function we want will appear in the list. At this point, you can quickly place this item on the block diagram by left clicking where you want it to go. In addition to quickly putting items on both the block diagram and front panel of VIs, Quick Drop provides additional functionality that can save you time with common and repetitive tasks. It might not seem like your saving a lot of time at first but once you’re proficient you can shave hours off of a large project. That’s time you could spend that time doing other things you enjoy, like reading more of my blog posts.<\/p>\n

Some of the shortcuts that I\u00a0use the most on selected items from within Quick Drop include:<\/p>\n