Category: ER

Enhancement Request

Drawings Top Ten list from years past: SWW2011

This entry is part 1 of 4 in the series Past Years Drawings Top Ten

Each year, SOLIDWORKS World has a top ten enhancement ideas countdown.  For a couple of months before SOLIDWORKS World, ideas are submitted by users to the SOLIDWORKS World Top Ten idea forum (login required). Starting in mid-December, users have the opportunity to vote on the ideas they most want.  This gives SOLIDWORKS a clear snapshot of what our customers need at that moment in time.  The top ten vote-getters are shown on the big stage at that SOLIDWORKS World. The list varies from year to year as new enhancements are implemented or as customers’ needs change. Some ideas also reappear on the list over several years.

Dan Herzberg has compiled a list of these top ten lists, including when the ideas where implemented and how many times an idea appeared on the subsequent lists.

There is no focus on particular areas in the top ten list. The top ten highest vote-getting ideas are combined from parts, drawings, assemblies, and other areas.   Since my main focus area on the SOLIDWORKS brand is “drawings”, it seemed like a nice idea to show the results for just the submissions for drawings.

We can show just the top ten Drawings ideas.  Drawings includes topics such as BOMs, annotations, dimensions, etc. The first year we can look at is SolidWorks World 2011.

SolidWorks World 2011 Top Ten Drawings Ideas

  1. Ability to Filter BOMs
  2. Print Selection – make it more like cropping a picture
  3. On drawings: add function to allow users to apply capitalization of text, implemented in SW2013
  4. Assign watermark function to drawing sheets, implemented in SW2013
  5. Allow Multiple Exploded Views per Configuration, implemented in SW2013
  6. More control over angle dimensions, implemented in SW2015
  7. On drawings: Allow option for resizing of drawing view outline
  8. Directly editing notes with properties in Drawing, implemented before SW2013
  9. Broken-out Section in Section, Detail and Alternate Positions Views
  10. Better line selection in drawings, implemented in SW2014

The implementation rate for the SWW11 drawing list is 60% to date.  None of these ideas had enough votes to get onto the official SolidWorks World 2011 Top Ten list, unfortunately.

There is still a couple of days to add new ideas on the current SOLIDWORKS World 2015 Top Ten list.  Voting starts on the 15th, so go back and vote on as many ideas as you wish!  Just remember, you have to logon to submit, see and vote for ideas.

SolidWorks World 2013 Top Ten Enhancement Request

There seems to be a nearly a whole new list of items in the SolidWorks World 2013 Top Ten list this year.  A pure performance request made the top of the list this year.  Plus, users are asking for more version interoperability.  A couple of items are already on the list for SolidWorks 2014, according the the sneak peak.  Here’s the list

  1. Make rebuild time faster
  2. Full backward compatibility
  3. Slot mate (announced in the SolidWorks 2014 sneak peek)
  4. Cylindrical mates lock rotation
  5. eDrawings mobile app on Android(announced during Nvidia’s presentation)
  6. Equal spacing on linear patterns
  7. Default concentric mate on axis to cylindrical surface
  8. External thread wizard for all thread types
  9. Draw a line segment starting from the midpoint
  10. Create auxiliary line for adding angle dimensions

 

SolidWorks World 2013 Top Ten voting is open!

Over 300 Ideas have been submitted for the SolidWorks World 2013 Top Ten list!  It’s now time to vote for your favorite enhancements!  If you are a user with a current subscription, you can vote (even if you aren’t attending SolidWorks World).  The more users that vote, the better the results will be.  Just sign in once you go to this link: SolidWorks World 2013 Top Ten.  Vote for the items that you want to see in SolidWorks and related products.  Be sure to view the entire list.  There are some gems that were submitted early (near the end of the list) that need your attention.

Tip: to see more Ideas at once, set the number of Ideas per page to be 50 (set in the bottom left corner of each page).

Have fun with it.  Feel free to leave comments on Ideas that particularly interest you.  If you vote down on a particular Idea, please leave a comment explaining your vote to help others understand as many perspectives as possible.

 

2013 Sneak Peek from SolidWorks Blog: Center of Mass

From the SolidWorks Blog,

SolidWorks 2013 won’t be officially unveiled until September 10, but over the next few weeks, we’ll be giving you sneak peeks at a few of the new features we’ll be shipping this fall. And here’s the first.

In SolidWorks 2013, center of mass is a selectable entity in drawings, and you can reference it to create dimensions. In a drawing, you can create reference dimensions between center of mass points and geometric entities, such as points and edges.

 

 

Resource: Guide to submitting Enhancment Requests for SolidWorks

I wrote up an article on the SolidWorks Blog a couple weeks ago.  It can be used as a resource to guide users to the area where they can submit their requests to improve SolidWorks.  The article is called Need SolidWorks to do more?  The article covers how to submit bugs and enhancement reqeusts.

Briefly, users should submit bugs to VAR.  A VAR can quickly determine if the bug is known or unknown and how best to address it.

Requests for new functionatality in SolidWorks (known as Enhancement Requests) may be submitted through the Customer Portal on the SolidWorks website.  However, always check to see if someone already has submitted a similar request, so you can vote for theirs instead.

If your request is for new functionality in SolidWorks, the first place to search is the Knowledge Base in the Customer Portal.  The Knowledge Base has quick how-to instructions.  It also has a list of outstanding enhancement requests from other customers.

Anyway, I invite you to check out the article.  It thoroughly covers the submission process.

 

Plug for Enhancement Requests

In past articles, I’ve mentioned some enhancement requests (ER’s) for SolidWorks.  Most (All?) of the enhancement requests I’ve made are now SPR’s, which are slated for some action at some time in the future.  To get the ball rolling on these requests, I’d like to invite others to vote for these changes in the Customer Portal.  I’m not going to provide links to my requests, as they wouldn’t work anyway with the Customer Portal’s java script.   I will mention a brief description of each change, and bold keywords which may be used to easily find the open SPR’s in the Customer Portal.  These are my requests, many of which I’ve talked about prior to submitting them to the ER system.

  • Support new ASME Y14.5-2009 symbols on drawings and models.
  • Option to force captilization (note the misspelling) of annotation notes on drawings (original article).
  • Add CR (Controlled Radius) symbol (original article).
  • Support External Threads as an actual feature similar to Hole Wizard (original article).
  • and a new one (no SPR yet), the ability to auto insert angle dimensions and values in sketch mode, just as we can already do with linear dimensions.  (This was inspired by a recent article by Deelip Menezes, in which he apparently misjudged SolidWorks dimension capabilities in sketch mode, but ended up finding a good candidate for an ER anyway.)

I have other SPR’s, but these are the ones that are actually enhancement related (as opposed to bugs or workflow annoyances).  Please visit the Customer Portal soon.  Choose “Enhancement Requests”.  In the ER search field, enter the bolded keyword(s) for each of the requests above.  Then pick and vote for the associated SPR.