Improve your efficiency with Drawings

One of the biggest pain points in SOLIDWORKS is drawings.  It’s not that creating a drawing is difficult – far from it.  Creating multiple drawing views is as easy as dragging and dropping predefined views from the View Palette.

I believe drawings are perceived as difficult due to the amount of time people spend trying to make their drawing “just right”.  As an Engineer or Designer you spend a lot of time creating your CAD models, adding dimensions and sketch relations, so you know exactly how each feature will behave.  Your investment is making your CAD model “just right”.  So why after placing a handful of drawing views onto your drawing sheet(s) are you manually recreating every dimension?  That is what Insert Model Items is for!

I’ll be the first to admit that using Insert Model Items is a scary proposition.  Dimensions often seem to propagate onto drawing views randomly.  Rather than cleaning up dimension placement, you manually recreate all of the model dimensions on the drawing.  I’m not one to recreate the wheel, so I’ll point you to a great blog article written by one of our friends at Javelin Technologies, Alin Vargatu, CSWE.

Do you want to save a lot of time when dimensioning your drawings?

Now that you’ve read about time saving methods for dimensioning drawings, you’ll have more time to improve upon the wheel. Good luck!