Pro Tip: Moving Multiple Component Primitives in Altium Designer

Sometimes you have a design where you don’t want to make a new footprint, but need to move a certain track or via 10 mil one way… for 30 copies of the same footprint.

Use !+x to move multiple primitives relatively.

You go select the footprints, unlock primitives, select the primitives, and then drag them to the new location only to see them remain in the same place. If you only needed to move them all to the same x or y location you could just update that value in the “PCB Inspector” panel. But what if you needed to move them all 10 mils to the right? How do you do a relative move from the PCB Inspector? There is a way. Use the exclamation mark “!”. This references the current location. So you do !+10 to move 10 units to the right. This may not seem like much, but if you’ve had to do that for 40 parts, you appreciate how cool this is. You just got 30 minutes of your life back. Enjoy.