Category: Tip/Trick

SolidWorks quick tips and tricks.

Rotating a Drawing View

Sometimes one need to show a rotated view in the drawing. If is available in the standard view, once can simply place it as desired. If there is no view as required, one may go to part or assembly and create a new view orientation and then use that in the drawing. To avoid that one can simply rotate the drawing view as required.

1. Click on the view or select the view you want to rotate.

2. Click on Rotate View on the heads up tool bar or standard tool bar.

3. You’ll now see a Rotate Drawing View pop up window.

4. Fill in the desired angle value (I have used 90°). You can also key in a negative value.

5. Once you have keyed in the desired value, click on Apply and view will be rotated.

6. Then click on close to exit the command and you’ll have a rotated view.

Agile Quick Tip: Where-used all revisions

Agile PLM has some very powerful search functions.  One function that may go overlooked is its ability to do a where-used search of an item across all revisions.  This means that if item 123 was removed from the BOM of released item 345, Agile will still allow the user to search for the past where-used relationship between the two items.

To do this search in Agile, use the Advanced Search tool and change Object Type to “Where-used One Level All Released Revisions”.  Then fill in all the other information and search as normal.  The search results will include all where-used across all revisions of released BOMs.

How to overline text on a SolidWorks drawing

Occasionally, a SolidWorks user may need to state a number or variable as approximate within an annotation note.  The mathematical symbol for this is an overline.  Overlining text is not readily supported by SolidWorks.  One solution is to draw a line over the text.  This is undesirable due to the messiness that comes about when trying to associate notes with sketch entities.  Another solution is to create a new custom symbol within the Gtol.sym file.  This takes time.  Also, the symbol has to be manually shared if the drawing is opened on another computer.  

 Here is a quick and dirty trick for creating overlined text on SolidWorks drawing:

  1. Start an annotation note.  
  2. With the note active and your typing cursor placed at the desired location within the note, click on the Stack button from the Annotations toolbar.

    3. stackicon

  3. Choose the style with the division line across the center.
  4. Choose the bottom alignment option.
  5. Type your overlined text in the Lower text field.
  6. Select OK.

stackwinww

 The one drawback to this trick is that it will force spacing above your line of text.  This may only be a concern if one tries to use this technique within the general notes.

Turn Toolbox parts into regular parts

Management of Toolbox parts can be a headache, especially if they are used in a PDM/PLM environment.  There is a little known fact that may help some CAD administrators with their Toolbox file management issues.  By default, any files from the Toolbox are flagged with a hidden property called “IsToolboxPart”.  To make SolidWorks forget that a part is from the Toolbox, this property must be set to “No” for each individual file.  SolidWorks has a small utility buried deep in its folder structure that does just that.  It’s called “Set Document Property”.

 setdocprop

To access it, run the file at this location “C:\Program Files\SolidWorks Corp\SolidWorks\Toolbox\data utilities\sldsetdocprop.exe” in most cases.  Once the program is open, it’s fairly self-explanatory.  Good luck!

Convert Entities workflow change in SW 2010

Convert Entities tool in SolidWorks  is commonly used to pull modelled edges into sketches.  Previous to SolidWorks 2010, the user had to select each edge or face and then execute the Convert Entities tool.  If the user only had a few edges, this worked fine.  However, if the user had a lot of edges or a chain of edges, this method was cumbersome.  Even still, many SolidWorks users are familar with the old way.  In many cases, the old way is actually best.

So, what changed? 

Convert Entities now has a PropertyManager.  The user is no longer required to preselect the correct entity types before starting the tool.  They can now start the tool, and then make their selections.  In addition to selecting faces and edges, the user now has the option to select a chain, which allows them to convert contiguous sketch entites more quickly.

What’s wrong with the new method?

There are several message threads on the SolidWorks Forums where users are complaining about the changes to the Convert Entities workflow.  A particular point of contention comes from those users who have a shortcut keystroke convertentitiesassigned to Convert Entities.  In such cases, the user only has to select their entities and then type one keystroke to convert them to the sketch.  This is very easy and fast.  The new dialog box in the PropertyManager drastically slows this process by requiring additional input from the user to dismiss the Convert Entities tool.

Is there a solution?

For us experienced users, there is a solution.  The Convert Entities PropertyManager has a pushpin.  With the Convert Entities PropertyManager open, simply click on the pushpin and then OK.  This will allow Convert Entities to be in “expert mode”.  In other words, the tool will work the same as it did in SolidWorks 2009 and previous.   This task has to be repeated each time the user starts a new SolidWorks session.

To bring back the PropertyManager for Convert Entities within the same session, simply activate the tool without any pre-selected entities.  The pushpin can be reactivated.

Long term solution?

The new workflow for Convert Entities is great, but it needs to be just a little smarter.  There should be a system option in SolidWorks that allows the user to pull the pushpin on the PropertyManager by default, instead of requiring the user to do it once for each session.  If you have an opinion about this, I welcome your comments here and on the SolidWorks Forum.