Catia V5 Training For Beginners - Cat Settings

By Author: Rosanna Daniel
Total Articles: 7
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Welcome back to our CATIA training for beginners series of articles. This article refers to CATIA v5. CATIA stores its settings, such as the position of toolbars, window size, and printer information and so on. CATIA stores this info as CAT settings files in a folder called CAT settings.

It's possible for CATIA to behave unpredictably, even crash; it doesn't happen often, but when it does, one generally restarts the software. However, if this mini-reboot doesn't clear up your trouble, another strategy is to delete the CAT settings files from the CAT settings folder. This allows CATIA to reboot with factory settings. If you've made a lot of custom changes to the software, you won't want to do this. But, generally beginners won't have made a lot of custom changes to the interface. However, restoring factory defaults is definitely preferable to a complete reinstall of the software!

So where on earth the CAT settings are files on your computer? They are in the installation directory for CATIA. The path will be in the Application Data folder of the drive where you installed CATIA, such as the C drive. The path goes ...
... something like this: C:\Documents and Settings\Username\Application Data\DassaultSystemes\CAT Settings.

(Uh, who is Dassault Systems? That's the French company that manufactures CATIA. They also own SolidWorks now. Hence "Systems" and not just systems!)

On some computers, the Application Data folder is hidden. Windows does this by default to protect you from erasing programs and important system and library files by accident. So, if this folder is hidden, you can make hidden files and folders visible with a left-click on Tools in the standard Windows menu strip at the top of your Windows Explorer folder.

Next, select Folder Options, and then go to the View tab. Scroll down to Advanced settings; under files and folders, look for the Hidden Files and Folders branch. Ensure that the radio button "Show hidden files and folders" is selected, instead of the other radio button, which says "Do not show hidden files and folders". After this, click Apply and OK. Now you should be able to see the Application Data folder.

So, Tools > Folder Options > View > Advanced, then select "Show hidden files and folders."

Open up the Application Data. Then, Dassault Systems > CAT Settings. You'll see many file names that end with the extension .CAT Settings. For example, WarmStart.CATSettings, Print.CATSettings, Tree.CATSettings, etc. You can window select ALL the files except Licensing.CATSettings. Don't delete your license file! Now, just delete all these settings files, and restart your software. Remember, when you restart CATIA this time, it will boot up with factory default settings.

This concludes this article in our CATIA training for beginner’s series; stay tuned for more.

About Author

This article is written by Rosanna Daniel, the owner of video-tutorials.net, provides high quality video tutorial training in Computer Aided Design (CAD) software. To know more about the company browse this link.