SOLIDWORKS: Creating GD&T it’s easy

April 12, 2021 by Roger Ruffin

What is SOLIDWORKS Geometric Dimensioning and Tolerancing (GD&T)? GD&T is the process of assigning dimensions and tolerances to features of a part in a way that makes it possible to manufacture, inspect, and assemble. It is used to add geometric tolerances using feature control frames to parts and drawings. SolidWorks drawing’s geometric tolerancing tools support the ASME Y14.5-2009 tolerancing guidelines. Back in the day when I was using AutoCAD, we were required to add GD&T to our drawings. GD&T was […]

SOLIDWORKS 2021: “Link to Property” in Drawings Notes Causing Crashes

March 31, 2021 by Mike Thompson

NOTE: This issue is fixed in 2021 SP 3.0, which is currently in early visibility on www.my.solidworks.com, however until the wide release is out, this is a fix. In SOLIDWORKS 2021, there is an issue with linked properties in Drawings notes causing SOLIDWORKS to crash to desktop: If you’re unfamiliar with the tool, it’s quite handy for automatically updating properties for different configurations so you don’t have to manually search out the values for certain properties (e.g. configuration name, mass, […]

Resetting (and saving) the DraftSight User Interface

January 21, 2021 by Kris Dubuque

Happy New Year! Even though it is the third week of January. With the new year comes more of the same, most of us are still working remote a majority of the time. Likely, you are like me and moving your laptop from one location to another and neither location has an identical hardware setup. I was recently working with a customer in a similar situation, three monitors at home and two at the office. Upon moving the computer from […]

Shortcutting In SOLIDWORKS

January 13, 2021 by Greg Buter

SOLIDWORKS software receives significant enhancements each release. Some of these are exciting new modeling functionality, some are performance increases, and others might be directed to the user interface. In this blog post we will review some of the great interface enhancements and customization options that you should be taking advantage of. MOUSE GESTURES SOLIDWORKS introduced mouse gestures back in 2010. Over the years the number of available gesture options has grown, and you can now assign up to 12 different […]

SOLIDWORKS – Lost a Drawing File?

January 9, 2021 by Craig Maurer

Have you ever had a customer come back with an old drawing print out or just a PDF of one, and for whatever reason, you just could not find it? Let me try and help you fix that problem! As we know, SOLIDWORKS Drawings has the option to link text to the part properties. From here you can call in your custom property fields like, description, part number, color, who designed it, revision, dates…. Whatever you want really, it is […]

How to Center Text in SOLIDWORKS Drawings

December 16, 2020 by Will Kefauver

The title block of a drawing contains all the information necessary to identify the drawing and the parts involved in the drawing views. To access all of this information automatically, linked text notes need to be inserted into the title block in “edit sheet format” mode. When adding text notes to a SOLIDWORKS drawing’s title block, it is desirable for the notes to appear like they “belong” there. Having notes centered in their cell of the title block will give […]

Importing .DWG files into SOLIDWORKS: Part 2

November 28, 2020 by Sara Hollett

Note: If you missed Importing .DWG files into SOLIDWORKS: Part 1, we looked at the beginning process of importing .dwg files into SOLIDWORKS. I covered how to choose only the layers that included the information that we needed and looked at how to center, position, and scale our imported sketch entities into a drawing file. Working with an imported .dwg file can create some unique obstacles. We no longer have drawings views to manipulate or a part model to reference. […]

SOLIDWORKS: Cleaning Up Drawings by Adjusting Dimension Extension Lines

November 26, 2020 by Greg Buter

The amount of information displayed on our SOLIDWORKS drawings can be massive. It is easy to end up with a cluttered drawing, having dimensions and annotations all over the place. Let’s take a look at some options for the dimensions and their extension lines. These will give you some tools that are certain to help clean things up. Auto Arrange Dimensions Using the Auto arrange tool is a quick and easy way to organize dimensions. Select the group of dimensions […]

SOLIDWORKS 2021 What’s New – VDA Balloons

October 26, 2020 by Ryan Field

SOLIDWORKS 2021 brings several great enhancements to help you effectively get your drawings done. One of those enhancements is the ability to tag inspection points according to VDA requirements. If you are not familiar, you must not be big into the German automotive industry; that is where VDA balloons are frequently used! If you are, or even if you are not and you need them, you are in luck. They work just like any other balloon or note leaders. Before […]

SOLIDWORKS: Sheet Metal Flat Pattern Info in a Bill of Material

September 17, 2020 by Nick Pusateri

In a recent support case, we were asked if sheet metal flat pattern info, specifically the flat pattern area, can be shown in a SOLIDWORKS drawing bill of material. After a little research it turns out that the answer is surprisingly yes and it’s not that difficult to achieve. So, you are probably asking yourself, “Where do you start?” Well, you first start by creating a drawing of your sheet metal assembly. See Figure 1 below. Next, we will add […]

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