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.
