Stumbling onto “new” things

So I’ve stumbled onto a couple of things in SolidWorks that I thought I’d share. I’m hoping that these weren’t common knowledge…

First, have you ever brought a huge piece of equipment into a new assembly only to find that the assembly template’s planes are miniscule? Did you know you can right click on the plane and select ‘Auto-size’? I stumbled across that one two days ago.

Next, and I’m really feeling like an idiot over this one, is renaming. I spent a good portion of yesterday fighting with a renaming macro. As you may recall, I’m dealing with non-native assemblies. When you import said assemblies, all the lower level parts are named "Import1", "Import2", etc. When you have multiple assemblies that you are going to combine into one large assembly, all those like-named parts cause problems. This is why I was fighting with the macro yesterday (many thanks to you guys on eng-tips!). Just as I was about to strangle the kid we hired to help us out, even though none of this was his fault, I "discovered" something in the ‘Save-As’ dialog. You know how you can choose References when doing a save-as? And then you can change the file paths for all those lower level parts? Well, there’s an option button there, too. Damn if you can’t add a prefix or suffix to the file names. I’m honestly embarrassed about not knowing that.

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July 31, 2008 · Posted in SolidWorks Tips

Comments

tjones

I've found pack-and-go is even easier than saveas; it lets you save everything in an assembly into a single folder with a single click, and also appends suffixes and prefixes.
JeffMirisola

True, but I don't believe you can use it on a newly imported assembly. Unfortunately, I can't test that out either. Perhaps someone else can share their experience? Can you use pack-n-go on a newly, unsaved, imported assembly?
Alex R. Ruiz

You shouldn't strangle your coworkers. Just do what I do and smack them upside the head. It gets your point across without the tell-tale marks.
Jeff Mirisola

Stephen,
One of two things are happening here. Either you're joking, or you don't read my blog often. If it's the latter, you should know that I was never seriously considering strangling anyone. Many of my comments, outside of the actual info, are facetious. Your comment does raise a question, though. If it had been his fault, would it have been ok to strangle him?
Stephen Goodall

You should be embarrassed about wanting to strangle someone when it wasn't their fault. I'm glad I don't work for you and hope you'll take a good long look at yourself so no one has to feel bad for the people that work under you.
Mike Puckett

Jeff,
Finding these 'new' things is where I think the documentation lacks. The bigger features are easy enough to figure out for the most part, but its these small little features that get greatly overlooked, but are of substantial use from time to time.

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