When people begin their CEREC journey, we always recommend starting with posteriors. I personally tell people to do this, not because anteriors are harder to design, but they are more esthetically demanding. That is our “billboard” if you will and we want to make sure that the patient is happy and we are proud to put our name behind it. The more teeth that we take on, the harder it is to make sure that we are putting in the same esthetic characteristics for each too. How do we make sure that the line angles or mamelons or whatever we want to modify are the same for each tooth? That is where we utilize the Link Options Tool!  

The Link Options Tool allows us to group together teeth and whatever tool we use on one restoration to modify, it will be done exactly the same to the linked tooth. This allows us to create beautiful and symmetric morphology on our restorations. I took some screen shots to show you the options with the Link Options Tool.  

The Link Options Tool is located at the bottom right of the icons.  

It will be greyed out unless you have multiple teeth that you have activated. When we click on the icon, we have the option to use the Symmetrical or Group function.

If we choose a Symmetrical function, the tooth selected and its symmetric counterpart will be active. The other teeth in the group will not.  

In this case maybe we want to do more significant effects on the centrals vs the laterals. Selecting Symmetrical will allow just those two teeth to be worked on symmetrically.  

The other option we have is Group. If we select Group, it allows us to select any and all the teeth we are working on by clicking on the circles at the bottom of the screen below the tooth icon.  

If we select all the teeth, they will all have the same exact thing done to them when a tool is selected. This is such a time saving option and really helps to keep the trains from going off the tracks during the design phase. I say this because when we are doing anterior cases, symmetry from the right to left quadrant is key. When dealing with anterior teeth, if one side looks even slightly different than the other, the eye will tend to pick it up and really notice the discrepancy. The Link Options Tool helps to minimize and pretty much eliminate this problem when tackling cases in the anterior.