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Understanding the right click menu

  • Duration: 03:20
  • Level: beginner
  • Axure Version: 7.0+
  • Date: Jun 26, 2015


When you put a widget on the canvas, you have access to a lot of functions accessible through the right-click menu. Just take a look.

Wow wow. What just happened there. There are a lof of options, right?

Let's take a look at some of these options. First, the Paste special menu. The Paste as Plain Text will allow you to paste a piece of text, without the formatting. Paste as image will paste the buffer as an image. The most useful feature of this menu is the Paste including locked widgets option. Imagine you have some content that you want to copy from one page to another. With this content you have a menu that is locked. See here? It's red. Meaning it's locked and I can't move it. By default, when you select everything and you choose Copy, it will paste everything EXCEPT the locked widgets. Now, let's try with the Paste including locked widgets option. I copy everything again, then press Paste. Now the menu appears too.

What about the other options? We have the Set hidden option. When you use this, it will hide the chosen component. Now why would you want to do that? Well, it is actually very useful to use it in coordination with the Dynamic Panel widget and adding some Interactions with it. Note that if you hide a widget, you will still see that something is here because it becomes yellow. Once a widget has been hidden, you can bring it back by selecting Set visible.

The Edit Text has the same effect as a double click on a widget - it allows you to edit or add a text to a widget.

The Auto Fit width and Height. Let's talk about these two. Let's take an example. If we take the Label widget for instance, and we fill it with a lot of text, see how the text goes to the next line when we reach the end of the widget. Now let's toggle the Auto Fit Width. If we enter a text that is wider than the width of the widget, we see that the widget takes the exact width of the text. The Auto fit height option has the same behaviour.

Let's talk about the Set Interaction Styles option. This is where you will specify how the widget will look like when you put your mouse over it, when you press the widget, when you select a widget or when a widget is disabled.

The Selection Group option is especially useful for checkboxes or radio buttons. Let's see how useful this is. First, we place two radio buttons on the canvas. If we generate the wireframe, we see that we can check the two radio buttons at the same time. And we don't want that, right? With the Selection Group, you can group objects of the same nature together. If we create a new group, like Gender for instance, we now see that only one radiobutton can be checked at once.

The other complicated features are Convert to master and Convert to dynamic panel. They are of course part of the masters and dynamic panels widgets, and we'll cover them in another video.

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