Recently someone saw me Ctrl+drag a leader attachment point to create a second leader for the same note and said, “Hey, wait! How did you do that?” I explained. Later I wondered if this was a well-documented feature or a super-secret trick that’s been passed along over the years.
I decided to do a quick search in SolidWorks Help for ‘multiple leaders‘ and was happy to see that the first result was exactly what we’d want: an article called ‘Multiple Leaders‘ under Help > Detailing and Drawings > Annotations > Leaders > Multiple Leaders. As I followed the contents down the tree, under the article Creating Multiple Leaders, there’s even a video!
By reading the Help, I learned a second way as well: Hold Ctrl and pick another edge before setting down the annotation… never knew that before.
And by reading the snippets from the related SolidWorks Forum Content, I was reminded that it’s also possible to right-click on a leader and choose ‘Insert New Branch‘, which gives this slightly different result:
It’s amazing what you can learn in that thing!
Oh! How did I pick the search term ‘multiple leaders‘? Here are a couple of things I try to think about when searching SolidWorks’ Help or Knowledge Base:
- If I’m interested in plural, is the exact quantity an absolute requirement for this question? Usually not, therefore ‘multiple‘ works well to cover all quantities other than one.
- What is the proper name of the feature? In this case ‘leader‘. (By the way, ‘annotation‘ is another term that would take you to the same article as the second search result rather than first. Also ‘arrows‘ would take you to one article up in the table of contents: ‘Multi-jog leaders.’
Tip: if you’re not sure of the correct term, try hovering over the buttons on the CommandManager or toolbars for a tooltip, or look in the PropertyManager at the names in there, such as this one for a note:
Sometimes it takes more than those two points, but in this case ‘multiple leaders‘ is just the ticket.
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