Derivative Design using Save As

Training at SolidSolutions also offers the attendees a chance to ask the instructor other questions about the software not related to actual course, we call this the SolidSolutions Surgery…Pre or Post course time is allocated to all kinds of queries that the instructor is happy to show on the projector to the whole room or individually on the user’s classroom workstation.

Last week during this period I was asked to remind a user how to use Save As to duplicate both the Part AND Drawing file at the same time, so instead of just sharing this with the delegate I chose to make the other delegates aware too, and I thought I’d share it with the rest of the SolidSolutions community with a blog post...

Let me explain below:

A lot of design work is based on an derivative design process where we often find users using Save As to duplicate the part, rename to the next part number and then continue to edit and make changes to the design, now this works fine up until the point you then need to create a 2D drawing and you’re faced with a Blank Page again, so the time you took to create the initial drawing of the previous version is required again…

A better way to complete this task therefore would be to save both the Part AND existing 2D drawing as new files whilst retaining the link between the two new documents.  This is achieved using the following method…

Go to File, Save As and click on Advanced…

On the Save As with References dialog…

This dialog allows you to specify new part names and file locations for these new parts, but most importantly it is retaining the reference link between the two new files.  Saving the new files with new names can be done by adding a Prefix, Suffix or using the Find/Replace function commonly used in Microsoft Office…

The new names and locations are then displayed in a Green Highlight

So pressing Save All will then give me two new files, ready to be modified to create my next design derivative leaving the two previous files behind…

By

Russell Richardson

Elite Applications Engineer

SolidSolutions