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Laying Out a GUI

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Starting GUIDE The Layout Editor

Starting GUIDE

Start GUIDE by typing guide at the MATLAB command prompt. This command displays the GUIDE Quick Start dialog box, as shown in the following figure.

From the GUIDE Quick Start dialog box, you can perform the following tasks:

• Create a new GUI from one of the GUIDE templates—prebuilt GUIs that you can modify for your own purposes.

• Open an existing GUI.

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The Layout Editor

When you open a GUI in GUIDE, it is displayed in the Layout Editor, which is the control panel for all of the GUIDE tools. The following figure shows the Layout Editor with a blank GUI template.

You can expand the tool icons in the Layout Editor to include component names. Open File > Preferences from GUIDE or the MATLAB Desktop and select Show Names in Component Palette, as shown in the following illustration.

See GUIDE Preferences in the MATLAB Creating Graphical Interfaces documentation for details.

You can lay out your GUI by dragging components, such as panels, push buttons, pop-up menus, or axes, from the component palette, at the left side of the Layout Editor, into the layout area. For example, if you drag three push buttons into the layout area, it might look like this.

The illustration also shows how the GUIDE tool palette looks when you set a preference to show component names, as described above.

You can also use the Layout Editor (along with the Toolbar Editor and Icon Editor) to create menus and toolbars, create and modify tool icons, and set basic properties of the GUI components.

To get started using the Layout Editor and setting property values, see Creating a Simple GUI with GUIDE in the MATLAB Creating Graphical User Interfaces documentation. Examples of GUIDE GUIs in the same documentation illustrates the variety of GUIs that you can create with GUIDE.

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What Is GUIDE?

Programming a GUI

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