Skip to main content
Altium Designer PCB editor with keyboard shortcut overlay highlighting net highlighting, layer cycle, and placement-navigation hotkeys

Tips & Tricks: Altium Designer Keyboard Shortcuts

GSAS Engineering · · 1 min read

When you’re working through a complex PCB layout, it always helps to know the shortcuts you can use to stay productive. Altium Designer® keyboard shortcuts, and keyboard + mouse shortcuts, can help you easily walk through your PCB layout during design and as part of final checks during a design review. The other very useful set of features in Altium Designer are the view options, which help you focus on essential structures in the design.

**In this webinar, you’ll learn about:
**
– Schematic Shortcut Keys
– Net Highlighting
– Layer Cycle
– Keyboard Shortcuts for Placement and Navigation

Timing:

Friday, 21st May 2021 | 02:30 PM to 03:30 PM

About the Topic!

Recorded webinar Session

Why shortcut productivity is a real metric for Indian PCB teams

A senior Indian PCB designer landing on a 12-layer 5G board, an automotive ECU motherboard, or an advanced packaging substrate spends most of their day in the layout editor, placing components, routing differential pairs, tuning skew, defining polygon priorities, cycling through layers to spot via-in-pad violations. The difference between a shortcut-fluent designer and someone clicking through menus is a real productivity multiplier across a full board layout. The same pattern shows up across every PCB design tool, not just Altium.

How Siemens Xpedition’s UX scales for shortcut-driven design

GSAS Micro Systems is an authorized engineering partner in India. Xpedition Standard and Xpedition Enterprise ship with a fully customizable shortcut framework, with two productivity surfaces beyond what Altium offers:

  • AI command prediction: Xpedition Standard’s AI assistant suggests the next likely command based on the current cursor context, the active layer, and the design state. For a designer cycling through routing modes on a high-density region, this is meaningfully faster than memorizing 50+ hotkeys.
  • Cross-tool consistency: for teams running HyperLynx for signal integrity, Valor NPI for DFM sign-off, and Xpedition for layout, the shortcut conventions stay consistent across the toolset rather than forcing context-switches.

For Indian teams evaluating workflow productivity end-to-end, the Altium Designer vs Siemens Xpedition Standard for Indian PCB teams comparison covers schematic capture, layout, constraint management, and the toolchain integration patterns that determine real day-to-day throughput.

Also appears in:

Need embedded development tools?

Talk to our application engineers for personalized tool recommendations.

Stay in the Loop

Get monthly compliance updates, product insights, and engineering best practices delivered to your inbox.

Related Articles

Embedded engineering workstation in India, illustrating the debug, analysis and design steps where AI now runs inside the process, supported by GSAS
Industry Insights

AI Inside the Engineering Process: What Is Worth Automating, and What Still Needs an Engineer

Arm, SEGGER, Perforce and Siemens EDA have each put AI inside a step of the engineering process rather than on top of it: debug, remediation, design entry, inference on the part. GSAS sets out the position behind our coverage of each: which steps are now worth automating, and which keep a human because the cost of being wrong is a recall.

21 Sept 2026 · 11 min read
Storage sizing ladder for automotive data logging: four rungs stepping from an aggregate link rate of 1 Gbit/s to 125 MB per second, then 450 GB per hour, then 3.6 TB per eight-hour shift, then 18 TB per five-day week, in decimal units, from GSAS Micro Systems India
Automotive Ethernet Automotive & Mobility

Automotive Data Loggers: Capture Without Loss

Search for an automotive data logger and the results split into cheap OBD dongles at one end and enterprise ADAS recorders at the other, with nothing in between explaining the engineering that decides whether you lose frames. This is the loss budget end to end: mirror oversubscription upstream of the logger, encapsulation overhead on the capture path, sustained write rate against burst rate, rotation stalls, and storage arithmetic worked in full so you can redo it with your own numbers instead of trusting ours. Written by the GSAS Micro Systems engineering team in India.

29 Aug 2026 · 13 min read
Two test paths leaving the same device under test, one into a conformance suite that returns a passed report and one into a partner node that surfaces a field defect, showing why an ECU can clear a published suite and still fail in a vehicle, from GSAS Micro Systems India
Automotive Ethernet Automotive & Mobility

Automotive Ethernet Conformance: TC8 and Testing Above It

Summarising TC8 as a layer 1 to layer 4 suite is wrong in both directions. The public OPEN Alliance ECU test documents run from transmitter distortion up to a SOME/IP chapter with its own standardised test stub, and they contain exactly one time synchronisation test case. This is what those documents enumerate, chapter by chapter, what genuinely lives above their boundary, why a passing ECU can still fail against a partner node, and how much pre-compliance work a Tier-1 in India can honestly do in-house before a test house visit. Written by the GSAS Micro Systems engineering team in India.

29 Aug 2026 · 12 min read