How to Use Push/Pull in SketchUp (P)

Pressing P activates SketchUp's Push/Pull tool, the single most defining feature of the entire application — clicking and dragging a flat, closed face extrudes it into a three-dimensional volume, or pushes it inward to carve out a recess, entirely through a simple drag rather than a separate extrude command with a manually typed depth field. **What counts as a valid face to push/pull**: the face needs to be genuinely flat (planar) and fully bounded by a closed loop of edges with no gaps — SketchUp shows a shaded fill on a face once it successfully closes, which is your visual confirmation that Push/Pull will actually have something valid to act on. A loop with even a tiny gap between two edges won't register as a closed face at all, and Push/Pull simply won't do anything if you try to drag it. **Getting an exact, precise depth**: dragging freehand gives you an approximate extrusion depth, but typing a specific number immediately after starting the drag (before releasing the mouse button) and pressing Enter overrides the freehand drag with that exact numeric value — SketchUp's Value Control Box workflow, the same typed-precision pattern used across most of its drawing and modification tools, essential for any work where exact dimensions genuinely matter, like furniture or architectural components meant to be built in the real world. **Push/Pull and adjacent geometry**: extruding a face that shares an edge with another face can extend, merge with, or otherwise interact with that neighboring geometry depending on the exact configuration — this is one of the genuinely trickier aspects of SketchUp modeling to build intuition for, and it's worth experimenting deliberately on a simple test shape to understand exactly how adjacent faces behave under extrusion before relying on it for a complex model where an unexpected merge could quietly corrupt the geometry. **Double-clicking to repeat the last Push/Pull distance**: double-clicking a different face with the Push/Pull tool still active applies the exact same extrusion distance as your most recent Push/Pull action, without needing to manually retype that same number again — genuinely useful for a model with several faces that all need to be extruded to the identical depth, like a set of window recesses on a building facade that should all be visually consistent. **Common failure mode**: if Push/Pull seems to do nothing when you click and drag, the most likely cause is that the face isn't actually closed — check for a small, easy-to-miss gap in the surrounding edge loop, since even a gap invisible at your current zoom level is enough to prevent SketchUp from recognizing a valid face there at all. **Related tools**: Offset (F), covered on the modification-tools category page, is commonly used immediately before Push/Pull to create a wall or frame of exact, consistent thickness — offsetting an outline inward and then pushing/pulling the resulting ring-shaped face upward is the standard technique for that specific, very common modeling task. **Mistake to avoid**: attempting to Push/Pull a face that's part of a Component or Group without first entering edit mode for that specific component (typically by double-clicking into it) can produce confusing or unintended results, since geometry inside a Component or Group is deliberately isolated from the rest of the model until you've explicitly entered its own edit context — a genuine organizational feature of SketchUp that new users sometimes bump into as an apparent bug before understanding its actual purpose.